Restoring a top-down control assumption: Salience effects in working memory are overcome with time.

Abstract

Working memory is a short-term storage space for cognitive information with a highly limited capacity. Due to this limited capacity, many theories address the issue of how items compete in working memory. The present study assesses whether the relative salience of items is automatically important or whether the deployment of working memory is more flexible than that. Some recent studies have suggested that salient stimuli are automatically prioritized in visual working memory. If true, this would suggest a fundamental inflexibility in how information is stored and remembered. We critically evaluate this claim and provide evidence favoring a more flexible account, which allows for top-down control to mitigate the influence of salience on working memory representations. Across four experiments, we support this account by demonstrating that previously observed relative salience effects on recall are not fully automatic and can be greatly reduced by allowing sufficient time to find all task-relevant objects. These findings suggest that salient objects are not inflexibly prioritized in working memory; but rather low-salience objects are difficult to find and encode, especially in large displays at brief time limits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).