Citation

Reinhart RM, McClenahan LJ, Woodman GF. Psychol. Sci. 2016; 27(6): 790-798.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University geoffrey.f.woodman@vanderbilt.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797616636416

PMID

27056975

Abstract

How do people get attention to operate at peak efficiency in high-pressure situations? We tested the hypothesis that the general mechanism that allows this is the maintenance of multiple target representations in working and long-term memory. We recorded subjects' event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing the working memory and long-term memory representations used to control attention while performing visual search. We found that subjects used both types of memories to control attention when they performed the visual search task with a large reward at stake, or when they were cued to respond as fast as possible. However, under normal circumstances, one type of target memory was sufficient for slower task performance. The use of multiple types of memory representations appears to provide converging top-down control of attention, allowing people to step on the attentional accelerator in a variety of high-pressure situations.

© The Author(s) 2016.

Language: en