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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 24, 2025

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions

Published on: July 16, 2015

Directed avoidance and its effect on visual working memory.

Ryan S Williams¹, Jay Pratt¹, Susanne Ferber¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada.

|April 11, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Directed avoidance can improve visual working memory (VWM) by reallocating resources to relevant items during encoding and maintenance, even when attention is initially drawn to irrelevant information.

Keywords:

Attention Distractor suppression Filtering Resource allocation Visual working memory

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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Dec 24, 2025

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions

Published on: July 16, 2015

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

A Dual Task Procedure Combined with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to Test Attentional Blink for Nontargets

Published on: December 5, 2014

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Visual Perception

Background:

Attentional control prioritizes information in visual working memory (VWM).
Prioritization's deliberate vs. incidental nature in VWM is unclear.
Previous studies often compare cued vs. uncued items, limiting understanding of intention-independent prioritization.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether VWM prioritization occurs independently of intention.
To examine VWM performance when attention is directed to task-irrelevant items using a directed avoidance paradigm.

Main Methods:

A directed avoidance paradigm was employed.
Experiments involved cueing task-irrelevant items in a visual search task (Exp. 1).
The paradigm was applied to a delayed-estimation VWM task (Exp. 2-5) to assess recall of relevant items.

Main Results:

Cueing irrelevant items paradoxically increased attention to them in visual search.
Directed avoidance improved recall of task-relevant items in VWM.
Benefits involved resource reallocation at encoding and stabilization during maintenance, not just during maintenance.

Conclusions:

Attentionally selected items may be initially prioritized regardless of relevance.
Controlled mechanisms reallocate resources based on relevance when sufficient time is available.
Directed avoidance demonstrates a controlled process that enhances VWM for relevant information.