Prioritization in Visual Working Memory: An Investigation of Distractor Susceptibility and Different Prioritization Modes

Previous studies have shown that information in the focus of attention in working memory is better remembered, accessed faster, and protected better from perceptual interference than information in working memory, outside of the focus of attention. However, the latter has been called into question by several studies that observed particular vulnerability to perceptual interference for information in the focus of attention. To advance this debate, the current study investigated whether focusing attention on prioritized information makes it more or less susceptible to distractors. For this purpose, we made use of two prioritization modes: retro-cueing and rewarding. Throughout ten behavioral experiments in which we used two different paradigms and varied several task parameters, we did not observe any convincing evidence for a detrimental impact of perceptual interference on memory performance, regardless of whether and how the to-be-remembered information had been prioritized. This suggests that visual working memory might be more resilient to perceptual interference than previously assumed. These findings, together with those of other recent studies, indicate that the key question should be when memory representations are vulnerable to interference, before we can investigate how this vulnerability interacts with the focus of attention. Moreover, a detailed comparison of different variants of cue-based and reward-based prioritization methods within our paradigm revealed that cue-based prioritization is more effective than reward-based prioritization in working memory and that what is gained in terms of memory performance for the prioritized item is not always as substantial as what is lost for the unprioritized items.