The guiding strength of sensory templates during preparatory stage of sustained feature-based attention

Visual attention is guided by attentional templates that store task-relevant information, but whether these templates contain sensory details, and how task factors influence their content and guiding strength remains unclear. We investigated these questions by combining sustained feature-based attention with a search task containing an irrelevant distractor that either matched or mismatched the target color in the sustained attention task. The difference in attentional capture by the distractor in the same-color versus different-color condition indexed the strength of the sensory template. We manipulated selection demand by varying the similarity between the two colors in the sustained attention task and presented cues in either sensory or non-sensory formats. With sensory cues, capture magnitude remained equally strong under both low and high selection demand. However, with non-sensory cues, low selection demand attenuated but did not fully eliminate capture. These results demonstrate that attentional templates store sensory content of cued features. The guiding strength of templates is not susceptible to selection demand with sensory cues, but non-sensory cues delayed or reduced the activation and maintenance of sensory templates under low selection demand. This suggests that cue format and selection demand contribute to how sensory information is represented in attentional templates to guide selection.