Abstract: Visual attention is a kind of selection which points at relevant information and restrains irrelevant information. Working memory (WM) plays a role in holding associated information and suppressing unassociated information. This paper is based on systematic reviews of existing literature on guidance of visual attention from WM and combines recent research on event related potential (ERP). From the visual search based on the two points of view of attentional capture and attentional suppression of the content of WM, we summarized the related research of visual working memory (VWM) and visual selective attention. Researchers have mainly been discussing two aspects in this field: (1) the guidance of visual attention from WM; (2) the conditions of the guidance of visual attention from WM. It suggests that no matter the contents of VWM capture or restrain attention, there are top-down and bottom-up two kinds of processing mechanism.

Key words: working memory, visual search, attentional capture, attentional suppression