Adding Details To The Attentional Template Offsets Search Difficulty: Evidence From Contralateral Delay Activity

Keywords

Contralateral Delay Activity (CDA); Event-Related Potentials (ERPs); Target representation; Visual search guidance; Visual working memory (VWM)

Abstract

We investigated how expected search difficultly affects the attentional template by having participants search for a teddy bear target among either other teddy bears (difficult search, high target-distractor similarity) or random nonbear objects (easy search, low target-distractor similarity). Target previews were identical in these 2 blocked conditions, and target-related visual working memory (VWM) load was measured using contralateral delay activity (CDA), an event-related potential indicating VWM load. CDA was assessed after target designation but before search display onset. Shortly after preview offset, the expectation of a difficult search produced a target-related CDA, suggesting the encoding and maintenance of target details in VWM. However, no differences in CDA were found immediately before search onset, suggesting a flexible and efficient weighting of the templates' features to reflect the expected demands of the search task. Moreover, CDA amplitude correlated with eye movement measures of search guidance in difficult search trials but not easy trials, suggesting that the utility of the attentional template is greater for more difficult searches. These findings are evidence that attentional templates depend on expected task difficulty, and that people may compensate for a more difficult search by adding details to their target representation in VWM, as measured by CDA.

Publication Date

3-1-2017

Publication Title

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Volume

43

Issue

3

Number of Pages

429-437

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000367

Socpus ID

85014105497 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85014105497

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