Derrek T. Montalvo¹ (), Blaire Dube², Julie D. Golomb¹; ¹Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, ²Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland

The visually complex environments around us make it difficult for our brains to select relevant information while ignoring irrelevant items. Thus, our brain uses various mechanisms to encode relevant information into our visual working memory (VWM), while filters prevent irrelevant information from being encoded. Dube and Golomb (2021) recently showed that spatial distraction not only captures external spatial attention, but also disrupts non-spatial attentional filters responsible for gating access to VWM, resulting in the encoding of irrelevant features at the time of capture (WM intrusions). However, is spatial distraction required to disrupt these attentional filters and cause WM intrusions, or is the presence of a salient stimulus alone enough? Participants performed two consecutive search tasks on each trial. In search 1 (S1), participants located a target ‘T’ among non-target ‘L’s presented within task-irrelevant colored squares. In 40% of the trials, a salient cue (white border) abruptly flashed around the target square (onset at 50ms, lasting 100ms), serving as a salient visual event while keeping spatial attention focused on the target. In search 2 (S2), participants located a uniquely oriented Landolt-C. The stimuli in S2 were all white, except one color singleton that either matched the color of the S1 target, color of a S1 non-target, or novel color. We tested if the S1 salient cue would cause its associated, task-irrelevant color to intrude into VWM and drive memory-driven capture in S2 (slower RTs when the singleton matched). Despite no disruption to spatial attention in S1 (S1 RTs were faster on cue-present vs. cue-absent trials), memory intrusions were triggered by the salient cue: on cue-present trials, RTs were longer when the S2 singleton color matched the S1 target square, compared to non-target matches and cue-absent matches. This suggests that perceptually salient cues alone can disrupt attentional filters and cause WM intrusions.

Acknowledgements: NIH R01-EY025648 (JG) and NSF 1848939 (JG)