It has been proposed that the deployment of selective attention to perceptual and memory representations might be governed by similar cognitive processes and neural resources. However, evidence for this simple and appealing proposal remains inconclusive, which might be due to a considerable divergence in tasks and cognitive demands when comparing attentional selection in memory versus perception. To examine whether selection in both domains share common attentional processes and only differ in the stimuli they act upon (external vs. internal), we compared behavioral costs or benefits between selection domains. In both domains, participants had to attend a target stimulus from a set of simultaneously presented stimuli or simultaneously active memory representations, respectively, with set, target, or both, being repeated or changed across trials. The results of two experiments delineated principal similarities and differences of selection processes in both domains: While positive priming from stimulus repetition was found in both selection domains, we found no consistent effects of negative priming when shifting the focus of attention to a previously to-be-ignored stimulus. However, priming in the perception task was mainly due to repetitions of the target feature (here: color), whereas for the memory task, repetition of the same set of stimulus representations was most important. We propose that the differences can be attributed to a reduced cognitive effort when the now relevant memory representation had already been pre-activated (even as a distractor) in the previous trial. Additionally, our experiments both underscore the importance of taking stimulus–response associations into account, which may be a hidden factor behind differences between domains. We conclude that any attempt of comparing internal versus external attentional selection has to consider inherent differences in selection dynamics across representational domains.

有人提出，对感知和记忆表示的选择性注意的部署可能受类似的认知过程和神经资源的支配。然而，这个简单而吸引人的提议的证据仍然没有定论，这可能是由于在比较记忆中的注意力选择与感知时，任务和认知需求存在相当大的差异。为了检查两个领域的选择是否共享共同的注意力过程，并且仅在它们作用的刺激（外部与内部）上有所不同，我们比较了选择领域之间的行为成本或收益。在这两个领域中，参与者必须分别从一组同时呈现的刺激或同时活跃的记忆表示中参加目标刺激，其中设置、目标或两者都在试验中重复或改变。两个实验的结果描述了两个领域中选择过程的主要相似之处和差异：虽然在两个选择领域都发现了来自刺激重复的正启动，但我们发现当将注意力转移到以前的目标时，负启动没有一致的影响。 - 忽略刺激。然而，感知任务中的启动主要是由于目标特征（这里：颜色）的重复，而对于记忆任务，重复同一组刺激表示是最重要的。我们提出，当现在相关的记忆表征在之前的试验中已经被预先激活（甚至作为干扰物）时，这些差异可以归因于认知努力的减少。此外，我们的实验都强调了考虑刺激-反应关联的重要性，这可能是域之间差异背后的隐藏因素。我们得出结论，任何比较内部和外部注意选择的尝试都必须考虑跨代表性域的选择动态的内在差异。