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Updated: Jul 14, 2026

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
Working memory and the guidance of visual attention: consonance-driven orienting
Liqiang Huang1, Harold Pashler
1Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
Abstract:
Two experiments investigated the potential role of the content of working memory in guiding visual attention. Experiment 1 showed that maintaining a shape in working memory resulted in a decisive preference for moving attention to the same shape in the background when those shapes were task irrelevant. Experiment 2 showed a similar preference for words that were semantically related to an item held in working memory. We suggest that keeping an item active in working memory automatically results in a tendency for attention to be "attracted" to stimuli that are related to that item either visually or semantically.
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