EFFECT OF WORKING MEMORY CONTENT ON ATTENTION CAPTURE TASK PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Past field research has shown that missing person posters have not been effective methods of locating missing children. One possible cause of this ineffectiveness is the failure of faces to automatically capture attention when a passer-by’s attention is occupied on an unrelated task. Utilising the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm to study attention capture, it was found that faces failed to capture attention when they were inserted as critical distractors in a single-target RSVP stream (Experiment 1). When a concurrent face memory task was included, it was found that participants showed better task performance when a critical distractor face matched one of two faces memorised for the concurrent task (Experiment 2) suggesting that working memory contents moderated task performance when content in working memory matched critical distractor content. This effect was only observed when the critical face distractor was presented 100ms (one frame) before the RSVP target. In contrast, other distractor conditions (salient colour distractor condition and baseline distractor condition) did not exhibit this effect. The effect also disappeared when the target was presented ? 200ms after the critical face distractor. These results suggest that content in working memory can affect RSVP task performance if information in working memory is related to task-irrelevant critical distractors.