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Attentional guidance from two representations of the same or different dimensions in visual working memory

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Abstract

Previous studies have only focused on the interference effect induced by multiple task-irrelevant representations from the same dimensions in visual working memory (VWM). The present study reexamined the issue by not only focusing on interference effect but also facilitation effect induced by multiple task-irrelevant representations from the same dimension in VWM. Furthermore, the guidance effect of multiple task-irrelevant representations from different dimensions in VWM was also investigated. Participants were instructed to complete a gap-location search task while holding two items in VWM. In Experiment 1, one of the colors (match-1) or both colors in VWM (match-2) matched with one or two targets or distractors in the search array. No guidance effects were found for match-1 trials, but there was a reliable interference effect when both colors in VWM were presented as distractors and a facilitation effect when they matched the color of two search targets. Experiment 2 was carried out to examine the guidance effect produced by multiple task-irrelevant representations from different dimensions in VWM. Participants were required to memorize the color and direction of an arrow. Attentional guidance effects were found when each one of the VWM features matched the search target, but there was no additive facilitation effect when both features were validated in visual search. These results provide evidence that multiple items in VWM can guide the attention simultaneously, but the guidance effects are flexible and various across different types of stimuli.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge support from the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271083) (to XZ) and the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (61632014) (to XZ).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Lingxia Fan, Mengdan Sun & Xuemin Zhang

  2. School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Mengsi Xu

  3. Department of Psychology, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Najam ul Hasan

  4. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Xuemin Zhang

  5. Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Xuemin Zhang

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  1. Lingxia Fan
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Fan, L., Xu, M., ul Hasan, N. et al. Attentional guidance from two representations of the same or different dimensions in visual working memory. Curr Psychol 40, 355–366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9949-9

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