Attentional Selection is the Gatekeeper to VWM

Visual attention and visual working memory (VWM) are intertwined processes that allow navigation of the visual world. These systems can compete for highly limited cognitive resources, creating interference effects when both operate in tandem. Previous research has shown that selectively attending, compared to non-selectively attending, an item causes obligatory interference with concurrently maintained VWM information. This finding may reflect that selectively attended items are automatically encoded into VWM. The current study examines this proposal by utilizing the procedures of the memory-driven capture paradigm. If an item is stored in VWM, then attention is captured by feature-matching items in subsequent tasks, and importantly even if they are distractors. On Trial 1, participants searched for a diamond shape with a varying colour. The target diamond was presented either alone (non-selectively attended condition) or among differently coloured non-targets (selectively attended). On Trial 2, the diamond-target and non-targets were the same colour, and one of the non-targets now had a singleton colour. This distractor colour could either match the colour of the diamond target from Trial 1 or was a novel colour. If a selectively attended item is automatically encoded into VWM, then it the feature-matching distractor capture on Trial 2 (measured via Eye-movements and RTs) should be higher for the selectively attended colour (Trial 1). This capture should also be above and beyond the effects of feature priming from the non-selectively attended Trial 1 colour. The results support this finding, the difference between matching and novel distractor colours are larger for the selectively attended condition compared to the non-selective attention condition. This study displays the effects of memory-driven capture in a task where participants were never required to encode stimuli into VWM and suggests that selective attention leads to obligatory VWM encoding.