Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 24, 2025
13:00
Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
9.9K
Repulsion bias is insensitive to spatial attention, yet expands during active working memory maintenance.
Mengdan Sun1, Yaxin Huang2, Haojiang Ying3
1Department of Psychology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China. mengdansun@suda.edu.cn.
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
|June 11, 2024
Summary
Visual working memory (WM) shows repulsion bias from distractors, whether attended or not. Directing attention to distractors strengthens this bias, potentially due to task relevance or WM load, not spatial attention itself.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Human Psychology
Background:
- Visual working memory (WM) is susceptible to biases arising from interactions between simultaneously or sequentially presented visual features.
- The influence of goal-directed attention on target representation and report bias, particularly concerning attention to distractors, remains incompletely understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how visual working memory (WM) biases for a target are affected by concurrent distractors under different attentional conditions.
- To determine if attention directed towards distractors modulates the report bias of the target.
Main Methods:
- Participants' WM biases for a target were examined when it was presented concurrently with one attended distractor, one unattended distractor, or both.
- The study analyzed report bias and interitem interactions during perception under these varying attentional states.
Main Results:
- A repulsion bias was observed, where the target WM was reported as being repelled away from concurrent distractors, irrespective of attention.
- The repulsion bias was stronger when attention was directed toward the distractor compared to when it was not.
- Increased relevance to the memory task or WM load, rather than spatial attention, likely explains the amplified repulsion with attended distractors.
- Directing spatial attention to a distractor increased the likelihood of misreporting the distractor as the target.
Conclusions:
- Attention is not required for repulsion bias to occur during perception of concurrent visual items.
- Goal-directed attention modulates the strength of interitem interactions in WM, with stronger repulsion bias when distractors are attended.
- The findings suggest that task relevance and WM load play significant roles in attentional modulation of visual biases, and spatial attention towards distractors can lead to target-distractor confusion.
