Visuospatial working memory mediates the preview effect in the absence of attentional capture D Barrett, S Shimozaki |
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School of Psychology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
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| Search performance is enhanced when a subset of the distractors is presented prior to the onset of the search display. This enhancement, known as the preview benefit (Watson & Humphreys, Psychological Review, 104: 90-122), is usually attributed to one of two mechanisms: the top-down inhibition of old-items in the preview display or the bottom-up capture of attention by new-items in the search display (Kunar et al., Psychological Science, 14: 181-185). According to the latter, the preview benefit is independent of visuospatial working memory (VWM). To test this assertion, we used signal detection analyses to compare target discriminability (d’) when the presence and temporal relationship between the preview and search displays varied. Targets in search displays preceded by an asynchronous preview display elicited higher d’s than those in a no-preview condition. Targets in preview displays that disappeared for 2 seconds before being presented synchronously with the search display, also elicited higher d’s than the no-preview condition. Importantly, this benefit occurred in the absence of luminance onsets distinguishing old from new items. This result indicates that competition between old and new items in preview search can be mediated by VWM, particularly when the temporal cues that elicit attentional capture are removed. |
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