Guidance of attention by irrelevant contents of working memory is transient.

Abstract

Information in working memory can have distracting effects on visual search. For instance, a color that is incidentally stored in memory may bias search toward items matching the stored color. We investigated whether attentional guidance by task-irrelevant colors is transient or sustained. To investigate this, we systematically varied the color match between memorized and target colors, as well as the set size of the search display. We found that the match between the task-irrelevant color in memory and the color of the subset with the search target resulted in equivalent reductions of search reaction times across varying set sizes, supporting the hypothesis of a transient effect on attentional guidance. A sustained effect would predict growing differences between matching and nonmatching colors as the number of scanned items increases. Using eye tracking, we ruled out postattentional target identification or decision making as potential explanations. Thus, the content of visual working memory guides attention to matching features even in case of task irrelevance, but this guidance is transient. Possibly, the activation of the irrelevant content is suppressed to avoid the prolonged distraction resulting from sustained guidance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).