An Examination of Distractor Susceptibility of Prioritized and Unprioritized Information in Visual Working Memory.

Abstract

This report presents three behavioral experiments examining how different approaches of attentional prioritization influence distractor susceptibility in visual working memory (WM). We used three prioritization approaches: spontaneous, cued-based, and reward-based. In Experiments 1a and 1b, which involved spontaneous prioritization, we found that the distractor susceptibility of the last memory item - often assumed to be in the focus of attention - did not differ from that of other items in WM. In Experiment 2, cue-based prioritization was associated with reduced distractor susceptibility for the cued item, whereas reward-based prioritization showed no such effect for the highly-rewarded item, regardless of when the priority signal was presented (before, during, or after encoding). Thus, across these three experiments, prioritization was found to either reduce or have no effect on distractor susceptibility, but never to increase it. This dataset provides a basis for further investigation into the interaction between attention and interference in WM under different prioritization approaches.