Many studies addressed the interaction between working memory (WM) and selective attention. However, these studies mostly concerned with the voluntary or endogenous mechanisms of selective attention and little is known about the relationship between WM and involuntary attention. Moreover, by investigating the relationship between WM and involuntary attention, we could get a deeper understanding of the cognitive control mechanism of WM. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how WM impact involuntary attention by manipulating the WM load. Meanwhile, in order to examine the load theory of selective attention, we adopted verbal WM task and spatial position discrimination task to avoid the competition of perceptual attentional resource between WM and selective attention. The spatial position discrimination task demanded participants to discriminate the position (left versus right) of a dot presented in a square. In half of these trials, visual distraction produced by a “pop-out” red Korean presented from one of the four side of the square. In the verbal WM task, a numeric string of 3-digits, 5-digits or 7-digits (low, middle and high WM load conditions, respectively) was presented in random order and participants had to remember the order for report at the end of each trial. Participants made signi?cantly more recall errors in the high and middle WM load conditions than in the low WM load condition, demonstrating that the verbal WM load manipulation had been effective. Repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) for mean RTs of spatial position discrimination task showed that distraction effect was influenced by WM load: the distraction effect was significant under high WM load condition; however, it was not significant under low and middle WM load conditions. This indicated that the cognitive control resources was consumed by high load on WM and resulted in a failure of suppression of distraction, so the distraction effect was significant; while in the low and middle WM load conditions, subjects could assign resource to suppress the processing of distracters, so there was no distraction effect. This result supported the load theory of selective attention: load on WM would reduce the available resources for cognitive control and result in increased distractor processing.
Key words
working memory /
load theory of selective attention /
involuntary attention
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