Cue-driven attentional guidance nearly eliminates salience effects in working memory

Working memory has a limited capacity, and it is therefore crucial to carefully control what information is stored in working memory. It has been suggested that there is a fundamental limitation in the control of working memory in that salient objects will automatically receive enhanced representations. These accounts propose that salient objects automatically compete within working memory, and this competition cannot be prevented by preemptive attentional orienting. The present study questions this claim. Specifically, we investigate a prior study claiming that attentional cueing is insufficient to eliminate salience effects in working memory recall (Constant & Kerzel, 2025). We propose that these findings occurred because participants were not sufficiently encouraged to attend to the cues in these studies. Across two experiments, we improve attentional orienting to the cues by strengthening their predictiveness and by increasing their duration. We find that attentional orienting can completely prevent salience effects on working memory recall, contrary to the conclusions of the original studies. These findings favor a more flexible account of working memory, whereby top-down control can be used to reduce the influence of salience on memory representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).