The Influence of Working Memory Load on Attentional Capture and Hold

After attention is captured by salient environmental stimuli, an involuntary hold keeps us focused until we disengage and reorient. Alongside attentional processes, our working memory has been shown to compete for cognitive resources needed to direct our attention. As WM load increases, attention can become slower to orient, less selective, or harder to sustain. The current experiments were designed to assess the effect of working memory load on the hold of attention, a less well-understood attentional mechanism. In Experiment 1, participants completed a modified attentional blink task to test whether working memory load affects the degree or duration of the blink. Experiment 2 employed a unique CPT-like task to assess the impact of load on stimulus detection and attentional engagement in the presence of visual distractors. Experiment 1 revealed a main effect of working memory load and lag, such that greater working memory load deepened the attentional blink, increasing its overall magnitude and reducing available resources for detecting the second target across lags. A marginally significant trend was found between working memory and lag, such that the magnitude of the attentional blink may vary across working memory load conditions. Experiment 2 revealed a significant main effect of time, indicating that reaction times were slowest at distractor onset and recovered thereafter. No significant interactions were found between load, distractor type, and time, indicating that attentional disengagement from task-irrelevant distractors was rapid. Collectively, attentional hold is not uniformly governed by working memory load but is instead shaped by the nature of the task and the temporal demands of stimulus processing.