Attend to compete or compete to attend: The possible role of attention in processing competing stimuli within visual working memory.

Abstract

Some stimuli (e.g., objects, scenes, faces) are consistently remembered better than others across individuals, due to variations in memorability (the stimulus-intrinsic property that determines ease-of-encoding into visual long-term memory). Within visual working memory (VWM), memorable stimuli enjoy a dual benefit: they are stored more efficiently (observers can store more memorable than forgettable stimuli) and are more competitive (when memorable and forgettable stimuli need to "compete" for limited VWM resources, the memorable stimuli are more likely to "win" access to those resources). Given the link between attention and VWM, we examined attention as a candidate for the source of the competitive benefit. In experiment 1, we investigated if observers selectively attend to memorable stimuli when encoded along with forgettable during a VWM task. Using a letter report probe task that enabled us to index where attention was allocated during encoding, we found that attention was drawn to memorable faces, but not via automatic attentional capture. In experiment 2, we determined the time course of attention allocation in relation to the emergence of the competitive benefit by manipulating the encoding duration of memorable and forgettable stimuli. The competitive benefit did not emerge until after there were differences in attention allocation, ruling out the possibility that the difference in attention allocation was caused by the competitive benefit within VWM. We speculate that the competitive benefit is a result of attentional differences between memorable and forgettable stimuli. Importantly, we find that attention can interact with stimulus memorability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).