Investigating the Proposed Mechanisms Guiding Negative Attentional Templates

To complete goal-directed visual search, information that is gathered in working memory must be sorted by relevancy to the current task. In order to bias search, attentional templates are created within the construct of visual working memory (VWM) using both endogenous and exogenous information. While most attentional templates are built around positive information, which is directly relevant to the target of search, there are cases where negative information, which is directly relevant to the search but not necessarily the target itself, may be more efficient. However, the mechanisms behind how these negative templates direct search is debated. The goal of this study was to test differing accounts of negative template use, as well as to introduce a novel manipulation to the literature to further investigate these accounts. The results of this study support the “register-and-destroy” account of negative template use, as well as the feature/location-based account. However, they do not support the automatic rejection or search-and-destroy accounts, nor can these effects be explained by practice alone.