content-specific working memory modulation of the attentional blink工作记忆内容特定的调制的注意力眨眼.pdf

Content-Specific Working Memory Modulation of the Attentional Blink ¨ Elkan G. Akyurek*, Ali Abedian-Amiri, Sonja M. Ostermeier University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands Abstract Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of working memory content on temporal attention in a rapid serial visual presentation attentional blink paradigm. It was shown that categorical similarity between working memory content and the target stimuli pertaining to the attentional task (both digits) increased attentional blink magnitude compared to a condition in which this similarity was absent (colors and digits, respectively). This effect was only observed when the items in working memory were not presented as conjunctions of the involved categories (i.e., colored digits). This suggested that storage and retrieval from working memory was at least preferentially conjunctive in this case. It was furthermore shown that the content of working memory enhanced the identification rate of the second target, by means of repetition priming, when inter-target lag was short and the attentional blink was in effect. The results are incompatible with theories of temporal attention that assume working memory has no causal role in the attentional blink and support theories that do. ¨ Citation: Akyurek EG, Abedian-Amiri A, Ostermeier SM (2011) Content-Specific Working Memory Modulation of the Attentional Blink. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16696. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016696 Editor: Mark Greenlee, University of Regensburg, Germany Received September 28, 2010; Accepted December 26, 2010; Published February 2, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Akyurek et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distributi