Early or late distractions hurt working memory differently depending on how long you look.

ABSTRACT: Visual Working Memory (VWM) is essential for temporarily retaining goal-relevant visual information, yet its limited capacity renders it vulnerable to distraction. While previous studies have examined the effects of distractors occurring during encoding or maintenance, it remains unclear how stimulus presentation duration modulates these effects and whether different types or quantities of distractors exert similar costs. Across three experiments, we systematically investigated how distraction timing, distractor content, and distraction load interact with encoding duration to influence VWM performance. In Experiment 1, participants performed continuous recall and change detection tasks under four distraction conditions (no-, encoding-, delay-, and full-distraction) and two encoding duratio

SUBMITTER: Ren G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12511591 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature