The effects of search-irrelevant working memory content on visual search

College

College of Liberal Arts

Department/Unit

Psychology

Document Type

Article

Source Title

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

Volume

85

First Page

293

Last Page

300

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

Previous experiments investigating visual search have shown that distractors that are semantically related to a search target can capture attention and slow the search process. In two experiments, we examine if distractors exactly matching, or semantically related to, search-irrelevant information held in working memory (WM) can also influence visual search while ruling out potential effects of color similarity. Participants first viewed and memorized an image of an everyday object, then they determined if a target item was present or absent in a two-object search array. On exact-match trials, the memorized object appeared as a distractor; on semantic-match trials, an object semantically related to the memorized object appeared as a distractor. Both exact-match and semantic-match distractors slowed search when the target was present in the search array. Our findings extend previous findings by demonstrating WM-driven attentional guidance by complex objects rather than simple features. The results also suggest that visual search can be influenced by distractors sharing only semantic features with a search-irrelevant, but active, WM representation.

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Disciplines

Psychology

Keywords

Short-term memory; Attention

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