Action similarity warps visual feature space in working memory.

Visual working memory (VWM) retains representations of past visual information for future action. Yet to date, most studies have approached VWM as just serving perception beyond the immediate. Whether and how prospective actions shape information in VWM remains largely unknown, in part because typical experimental setups limit behavior to simple button presses.

Reduced contextual uncertainty facilitates learning what to attend to and what to ignore.

Variability in the search environment has been shown to affect the capture of attention by salient distractors, as attentional capture is reduced when context variability is low. However, it remains unclear whether this reduction in capture is caused by contextual learning or other mechanisms, grounded in generic context-structure learning. We set out to test this by training participants (n = 200) over two sessions in a visual search task, conducted online, where they gained experience with a small subset of search displays, which significantly reduced capture of attention by colour singletons.

Action Planning Renders Objects in Working Memory More Attentionally Salient.

A rapidly growing body of work suggests that visual working memory (VWM) is fundamentally action oriented. Consistent with this, we recently showed that attention is more strongly biased by VWM representations of objects when we plan to act on those objects in the future. Using EEG and eye tracking, here, we investigated neurophysiological correlates of the interactions between VWM and action.

A certain future strengthens the past: Knowing ahead how to act on an object prioritizes its visual working memory representation.

Findings from recent studies indicate that planning an action toward an object strengthens its visual working memory (VWM) representation, emphasizing the importance of sensorimotor links in VWM. In the present study, we investigated to what extent such sensorimotor links are modulated by how well-defined an action plan is. In three eye-tracking experiments, we asked participants to memorize a visual stimulus for a subsequent memory test, whereby they performed a specific hand movement toward memory-matching probes.