1. VISUAL SEARCH REMAINS EFFICIENT WHEN VISUALWORKING MEMORY IS FULL Geoffrey F. Woodman, Edward K. Vogel, and Steven J. Luck PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE (2001)

2. This article examines interactions between visual attention and visual working memory in the context of visual search.

3. visual attention the RTs increase linearly as the number of items in the arrays is increased

4. visual working memory visual working memory also plays a significant role in visual search a template of the search target may be stored in VWM (Desimone & Duncan, 1995) once a target is detected,it must be transferred into WM so that it can beused to control overt behavior (Duncan, 1980) when attention is focused on an item, this item is automatically transferred into VWM

5. attention & VWM the searcheditems are stored in WM serial models parallel models

6. attention & VWM the searcheditems are NOT stored in WM visual objectidentification can occur more rapidly than the encoding of informationinto visual working memory (Jolicoeur & Dell’ Acqua, 1998; Potter,1976; Thorpe, Fize, & Marlot, 1996; Vogel, Luck, & Shapiro, 1998) observers do not even remember the locations of the items they have searched, so attention may revisit a given nontarget item multiple times.(Horowitz and Wolfe, 1998)

7. goal whether visual search does indeed involve thetransfer of information into visual working memory

8. EXPERIMENT 1 SS = 4, 8, or 12

9. Results 3.2 items 2.7 items Equation (Pashler, 1988)

10. Discussion change in intercept; NO change in slope memory task led to a slowing of a process that eitherpreceded or followed the actual search there was NO evidence that the search process itself was impaired by the addition of a memory load

11. Discussion impairment in memory accuracy nonspecific disruption of the WM representation by the mere appearance of the search array ->Experiment 3

12. Discussion performance: single task = dual task different strategies memory set size: 2, 4 (within blocks) -> = EXP 1 the memory task used in Experiment 1 did not actually fill working memory to capacity condition 1: 4 colored squares condition 2: 4 colored squares + square with the gap -> accuracy: condition 1 > condition 2

13. EXPERIMENT 2

14. Results

15. EXPERIMENT 3 Experiment 3 investigated thecause of the small impairment in memory performance that was observed in the dual-task conditions of Experiments 1 and 2. ignore the search array

16. Results and Discussion the deficit in memory performanceobserved in the dual-task conditions of the previous experimentswas not due to visual search per se, but instead reflects somesort of nonspecific masking or interruption

17. GENERAL DISCUSSION visual search causes minimal displacementof information already in VWM theefficiency of the search process is not impaired when VWM is filled to capacity intercept ↑: a delay in the onset of the search process or a delay in postsearch processes such as response selection

18. GENERAL DISCUSSION it is possible that a different working memory task would interfere with the search process objects canbe attended at a perceptual level without automatically being enteredinto WM