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, a

SUBMITTER: Vergauwe E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12466325 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature