Exogenous attention and its relationship with working memory contents: beyond spatial selection

To successfully perform everyday activities, cognitive functions such as working memory (WM) and selective attention are necessary. Specifically, when environmental demands are dynamic, exogenous attention is crucial. However, its ability to select and prioritize not only perceptual spatial locations, but also novel stimulus-response (S-R) bindings held in WM remains largely unexplored. By implementing a retro-cueing paradigm on a task that capitalized on WM, the present experiment's aim was two-fold: i) to evaluate whether exogenous cueing effects would not only impact spatial processing but also WM content, and ii) to explore how meta-control states induced by the manipulation of an intervening event (IE) would modulate these effects. We observed (N = 50) that exogenous attention led to selection of space, as it is usually observed in spatial exogenous attention paradigms, but also the content associated with that location. Moreover, space selection was modulated by the IE manipulation, which was thought to induce two meta-control states (persistent vs. flexible). As such, the presence of the IE also modulated participants' performance regarding novel vs. repeated stimulus-response mappings, again hinting at 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, meta-control state, etc.), which are retrieved together once one or more of its elements are encountered. Although preliminary, this evidence of exogenous attentional selection of WM through event file activation paves the way for a promising research line.