Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

The current body of work examined visual attention and working memory to determine their interaction and functional overlap. Examining attention and working memory across visual search and spatial reasoning tasks revealed that they function similarly and rely on one another. Specifically, top-down and bottom-up influences from task demands and stimuli altered how attention and working memory interact. Through two visual search tasks used in Chapters 1 and 2, it was found that displays and stimuli (bottom-up influences) alter how attention is used and subsequently influence what is processed and maintained in working memory. In Chapter 2, it was found that the overall prevalence of targets present during a task (top-down influence) alters how attention is used to select information. However, the bottom-up influence of the display being searched was a stronger influence over how selected information would be processed by attention and working memory than target prevalence. A spatial reasoning task used in Chapter 3 revealed that some processes that enroll attention and working memory during mental rotation are stable across stimuli sets (encoding and rotation), while others are flexible (comparison). Overall, the results of the current dissertation suggest that task demands and the displays/stimuli used in visual tasks influence the attention used and what is stored in working memory, which subsequently influence one another. This interaction may rely on the mental representations formed while performing the task, revealing the intersection between visual attention and working memory and reflecting the potential need to update currently held models of visual search.

Date

7-16-2024

Committee Chair

Beck, Melissa R.

Download

Available for download on Thursday, July 15, 2027

Share

COinS