| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 103 === The reappearance of the representation stored in working memory captures attention by top-down biasing the competition among external stimuli. However, whether all representations stored in working memory can capture attention remains an issue for investigation. Previous studies show reliable capture effect when only one item is stored in working memory, inconsistent findings when two items are stored in memory, and null results when four items are stored in working memory using objects or non-spatial features. The studies that investigate spatial working memory focus on attention-based rehearsal and the results suggest that one location can capture attention while three locations can be stored in working memory. The goal of this study is to investigate how memory load and attention-based rehearsal can modulate working memory-driven attention capture in the spatial domain. In Experiment 1, the participants were required to remember one or four locations for a later memory test while performing a dot detection task. The results showed attentional capture only in the one-location condition and not in the four-location condition. In Experiment 2, four locations were memorized and two of them were cued sequentially prior to the dot detection display. The results showed null working memory-driven capture effect. That is, a weak representation could not capture attention even after being refreshed by a retro-cue. In Experiment 3, only one location was memorized while the contingency between the retro-cue and the memorized location was decreased by adding the invalid retro-cue condition to examine whether both a strong spatial representation and attention-based rehearsal are necessary to produce the capture effect. The result showed that attention was captured only by the content stored in spatial working memory; the possibility of attention-based rehearsal could not be fully excluded. Taken together, the results from this study suggest that a strong spatial representation stored in working memory can capture attention. When multiple spatial items are encoded for storage in working memory, each item representation is weak so that it cannot capture attention even this representation is reactivated by a spatial retro-cue.
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