What Drives MemoryDriven Attentional Capture? The Effects of Perceptual Difficulty, Stimulus Energy, and Memory Exposure Duration

Currently there are mixed evidence on whether the contents of working memory could automatically influence attention selection in visual search. By using the dualtask paradigm, this present study, which inspired by the compassion of previous studies and the analysis of their flaws, was designed to explore the effects of perceptual difficulty, stimulus energy, and memory exposure duration on memorydriven attention capture. And evidence was found that perceptual difficulty did affect the effects of working memory contents on attention selection. When the search task was hard, there was no significant difference between the memorymatching condition and the neutral condition. But perceptual difficulty could not exert its effects unless the visual search was hard enough. But the present study failed to find any effects of stimulus energy and memory exposure duration on memorydriven attention capture. Even when the stimulus energy of the search items was low, or the memory exposure duration was short, the memorymatching item could still capture attention.