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Testing a sensory preactivation account of attention guidance from visual working memory
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Testing a sensory preactivation account of attention guidance from visual working memory

Zexuan Niu and Andrew Hollingworth
Journal of experimental psychology. General
06/08/2026
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001947
PMID: 42258245

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Abstract

Visual working memory (VWM) maintains visual information in support of ongoing cognitive functions, such as attentional guidance. Here, we tested the standard account of attention guidance by VWM, in which sensory-level preactivation during VWM maintenance interacts with new sensory processing to enhance the relative priority of matching items. To do this, we tested, broadly, whether sensory preactivation can support a guidance function. Participants viewed a preview color for 50 ms that they either did or did not have to remember. This was followed by a search array after a variable interstimulus interval of 0-500 ms, in 50 ms steps. A search-array item matching the preview color was either the target or a distractor, allowing us to assess attention guidance. We compared guidance by VWM (memory demand: Experiment 1) with guidance from sensory preactivation alone (no memory demand: Experiments 2-4), focusing on the interstimulus interval range of iconic memory. In that range, sensory persistence from the preview color should have overlapped, temporally, with the appearance of the search array. If sensory preactivation is the source of attention guidance from VWM, we predicted that sensory persistence from a physical stimulus should generate guidance qualitatively similar to that from VWM. The results disconfirmed this hypothesis, as sensory persistence alone generated no or only weak attention guidance, differing qualitatively from the robust guidance generated by VWM. The results indicate that sensory recruitment during VWM maintenance is unlikely to be central to attention guidance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
 visual working memory attention sensory recruitment

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