EXOGENOUS ATTENTION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH WORKING MEMORY CONTENTS: NOT ONLY “WHERE?”, BUT ALSO “WHAT?”

Historically, memory and attention have been associated with the past and the future, respectively. However, recent research is moving forward to show that memory fulfills a prospective function, and attention relies heavily on previous experience. In between, working memory (WM) guides flexible and adaptive behavior. Consequently, the present experiment aimed to characterize the relationship between exogenous attention and WM contents by implementing an exogenous retro-cueing paradigm on a task that capitalized on WM. The present research had a two-fold goal: i) to evaluate if cueing effects would not only impact spatial processing but also WM content, and ii) to explore how metacontrol states induced by the manipulation of an intervening event (IE) would modulate these effects. We observed (N=60) that exogenous attention, not only selected space, as it is usually accepted in exogenous attention paradigms, but also, the content associated to that location. Moreover, space selection was modulated by the IE manipulation, which was thought to induce two metacontrol states (persistent vs. flexible). As such, IE manipulation also modulated the participants’ performance regarding novel vs. repeated stimulus-response mappings, hinting again an important role of content in this task. This pattern of findings fits well with the concept of event file, a mental representation of all relevant components assembled at the beginning of a trial (i.e., cue, target, lateralization, metacontrol state, goals, etc.), which are retrieved together once one or more of its elements are encountered. Although introductory, the present experiment opens the door for a new promising line of research.