In competition for the attentional template: can multiple items within visual working memory guide attention?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Attention deployment can be influenced by visual working memory (VWM) content.
• However, stored memories do not consistently interact with attention.
• A model proposes VWM has an active template interacting with perception and accessory representations that do not.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if multiple memory representations in VWM can bias attention.
• To test the hypothesis of distinct VWM representations interacting differently with attention.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a visual search task.
• A variable number of colors were maintained in VWM.
• Attentional capture by memory-related distractors was measured.

Main Results:

• Increased attentional capture occurred with a single VWM item, consistent with prior findings.
• Attentional capture by memory-related distractors was absent with memory loads exceeding one item.
• This absence was independent of VWM capacity, memory encoding, forgetting, or precision.
• Attentional interference reappeared when a specific memory item was cued.

Conclusions:

• Results support a distinction within VWM between representations that interact with perception and those that do not.
• Only a single VWM representation can interact with visual attention at any given time.