Selectively attended information is obligatorily encoded into visual working memory.

Abstract

There exists a bidirectional relationship between visual attention and visual working memory (VWM). Some argue that it is a voluntary process to encode an attended item into VWM. However, research has shown that attentional selection (defined as selection of one item from others) exclusively interferes with retained VWM information. The current study puts forth a selective-encoding hypothesis, that a selectively attended item is automatically encoded into VWM, which would clarify a critical link between selective attention and VWM. On Trial 1 (T₁) participants searched for a target item, either presented among nontarget items (selection) or in isolation to account for feature priming (target alone). On Trial 2 (T₂) participants continued to search for the same target among nontargets, however, a color distractor was now present that could either match the color of the T₁ target or was a neutral color. In Experiment 1, we showed that when a target item is selected on T₁ the magnitude of distraction (measured via eye movements and response times) from the matching distractor was greater than the neutral distractor, compared to the target-alone condition. This critical interaction was replicated in Experiments 2a and 2b, which varied different search parameters controlling for stimulus-driven confounds. Experiment 3 established a causal link between selection-driven capture and VWM. When VWM was at capacity, influence from the selectively attended T₁ target on T₂ distraction was eliminated, while performance across memory conditions was consistent for target-alone T₁ conditions. Together the three experiments show evidence for obligatory encoding of selectively attended items into VWM. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).