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.