Xinran Chen¹ (), Huixin Song¹, Mowei Shen¹, Hui Chen¹, Yingtao Fu¹; ¹Zhejiang University

Visual working memory (VWM) has been thought to be supported by sensory storage and has a close interaction with visual perception. However, a series of behavioral and neural evidence emerging in recent years demonstrates that only the active, but not the passive state in VWM relies on sensory storage, raising the debate regarding whether VWM selectively recruits sensory representation. The current study aims to delve into this debate further by testing whether increasing the load of active/passive states in VWM affects detection sensitivity to an incoming visual stimulus, a paradigm which has been verified to specifically uncover the sensory nature of working memory storage. In Experiments 1-3, we consistently found that loading either active or passive VWM state impaired the visual detection to a similar degree, suggesting that both states involved sensory storage. Experiment 4 validated the state manipulation by observing dissociative memory-driven attentional bias effect of different states. Experiment 5 showed that information released from VWM no longer impaired visual detection, further confirmed the specific role of VWM storage (in either active or passive state) in interfering with sensory processing. Together, the current findings demonstrate that VWM relies on sensory storage regardless of representational states.