Long-term memory facilitates spontaneous memory usage through multiple pathways.

Memories scaffold ongoing cognition and behavior. Surprisingly, when given the "sensorimnemonic" choice between using working memory (WM) and sampling sensory information from the environment, reliance on WM is much lower than expected. Here, we ask how the availability of long-term memory (LTM), alongside WM, changes how participants spontaneously sample sensory information in service of memory encoding, rely on their memory, and coordinate the two.

Spatiotemporal predictions guide attention throughout the adult lifespan.

Older adults struggle with tasks requiring selective attention amidst distractions. Experimental observations about age-related decline have relied on visual search designs using static displays. However, natural environments often embed dynamic structures that afford proactive anticipation of task-relevant information.

Neural dynamics of shifting attention between perception and working-memory contents.

In everyday tasks, our focus of attention shifts seamlessly between contents in the sensory environment and internal memory representations. Yet, research has mainly considered external and internal attention in isolation. We used magnetoencephalography to compare the neural dynamics of shifting attention to visual contents within vs.

Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction.

Hypothesis-driven research rests on clearly articulated scientific theories. The building blocks for communicating these theories are scientific terms. Obviously, communication - and thus, scientific progress - is hampered if the meaning of these terms varies idiosyncratically across (sub)fields and even across individual researchers within the same subfield.

Prospection of Potential Actions during Visual Working Memory Starts Early, Is Flexible, and Predicts Behavior.

For visual working memory to serve upcoming behavior, it is crucial that we prepare for the potential use of working-memory contents ahead of time. Recent studies have demonstrated how the prospection and planning for an upcoming manual action starts early after visual encoding, and occurs alongside visual retention. Here, we address whether such "output planning" in visual working memory flexibly adapts to different visual-motor mappings, and occurs even when an upcoming action will only potentially become relevant for behavior.

Good-enough attentional guidance.

Theories of attention posit that attentional guidance operates on information held in a target template within memory. The template is often thought to contain veridical target features, akin to a photograph, and to guide attention to objects that match the exact target features. However, recent evidence suggests that attentional guidance is highly flexible and often guided by non-veridical features, a subset of features, or only associated features.

Consequences of predictable temporal structure in multi-task situations.

In everyday life, we often anticipate the timing of an upcoming task or event while actively engaging in another. Here, we investigated the effects of predictable temporal structure within such a multi-task scenario. In a visual working-memory task, we manipulated whether the onset of a working-memory probe could be predicted in time, while also embedding a simple intervening task within the delay period.

Be there on time: Spatial-temporal regularities guide young children's attention in dynamic environments.

Children's ability to benefit from spatiotemporal regularities to detect goal-relevant targets was tested in a dynamic, extended context. Young adults and children (from a low-deprivation area school in the United Kingdom; N = 80; 5-6 years; 39 female; ethics approval did not permit individual-level race/ethnicity surveying) completed a dynamic visual-search task. Targets and distractors faded in and out of a display over seconds.

Right place, right time: Spatiotemporal predictions guide attention in dynamic visual search.

Visual search is a fundamental element of human behavior and is predominantly studied in a laboratory setting using static displays. However, real-life search is often an extended process taking place in dynamic environments. We have designed a dynamic-search task in order to incorporate the temporal dimension into visual search.

Shielding working-memory representations from temporally predictable external interference.

Protecting working-memory content from distracting external sensory inputs and intervening tasks is an ubiquitous demand in daily life. Here, we ask whether and how temporal expectations about external events can help mitigate effects of such interference during working-memory retention. We manipulated the temporal predictability of interfering items that occurred during the retention period of a visual working-memory task and report that temporal expectations reduce the detrimental influence of external interference on subsequent memory performance.

Output planning at the input stage in visual working memory.

Working memory serves as the buffer between past sensations and future behavior, making it vital to understand not only how we encode and retain sensory information in memory but also how we plan for its upcoming use. We ask when prospective action goals emerge alongside the encoding and retention of visual information in working memory. We show that prospective action plans do not emerge gradually during memory delays but are brought into memory early, in tandem with sensory encoding.

Functional biases in attentional templates from associative memory.

In everyday life, attentional templates-which facilitate the perception of task-relevant sensory inputs-are often based on associations in long-term memory. We ask whether templates retrieved from memory are necessarily faithful reproductions of the encoded information or if associative-memory templates can be functionally adapted after retrieval in service of current task demands. Participants learned associations between four shapes and four colored gratings, each with a characteristic combination of color (green or pink) and orientation (left or right tilt).

One Thing Leads to Another: Anticipating Visual Object Identity Based on Associative-Memory Templates.

Probabilistic associations between stimuli afford memory templates that guide perception through proactive anticipatory mechanisms. A great deal of work has examined the behavioral consequences and human electrophysiological substrates of anticipation following probabilistic memory cues that carry spatial or temporal information to guide perception. However, less is understood about the electrophysiological substrates linked to anticipating the sensory content of events based on recurring associations between successive events.

Reading scenes: how scene grammar guides attention and aids perception in real-world environments.

Despite many recent technical advances, the human efficacy of naturalistic scene processing is still unparalleled. What guides attention in real world environments? How does scene context affect object search and classification? And how are the many predictions we have with regards to our visual environment structured? Here, we review the latest findings that speak to these questions, ranging from traditional psychophysics, eye movement, and neurocognitive studies in the lab to experiments in virtual reality (VR) and the real world. The growing interest and grasp of a scene's inner workings are enriching our understanding of the efficiency of scene perception and could inspire new technological and clinical advances.

Anchoring visual search in scenes: Assessing the role of anchor objects on eye movements during visual search.

The arrangement of the contents of real-world scenes follows certain spatial rules that allow for extremely efficient visual exploration. What remains underexplored is the role different types of objects hold in a scene. In the current work, we seek to unveil an important building block of scenes-anchor objects.

One visual search, many memory searches: An eye-tracking investigation of hybrid search.

Suppose you go to the supermarket with a shopping list of 10 items held in memory. Your shopping expedition can be seen as a combination of visual search and memory search. This is known as "hybrid search.

Lost in the supermarket: Quantifying the cost of partitioning memory sets in hybrid search.

The items on a memorized grocery list are not relevant in every aisle; for example, it is useless to search for the cabbage in the cereal aisle. It might be beneficial if one could mentally partition the list so only the relevant subset was active, so that vegetables would be activated in the produce section. In four experiments, we explored observers' abilities to partition memory searches.

Hybrid foraging search: Searching for multiple instances of multiple types of target.

This paper introduces the "hybrid foraging" paradigm. In typical visual search tasks, observers search for one instance of one target among distractors. In hybrid search, observers search through visual displays for one instance of any of several types of target held in memory.

You look familiar, but I don't care: Lure rejection in hybrid visual and memory search is not based on familiarity.

In "hybrid" search tasks, observers hold multiple possible targets in memory while searching for those targets among distractor items in visual displays. Wolfe (2012) found that, if the target set is held constant over a block of trials, reaction times (RTs) in such tasks were a linear function of the number of items in the visual display and a linear function of the log of the number of items held in memory. However, in such tasks, the targets can become far more familiar than the distractors.

Searching while loaded: Visual working memory does not interfere with hybrid search efficiency but hybrid search uses working memory capacity.

In "hybrid search" tasks, such as finding items on a grocery list, one must search the scene for targets while also searching the list in memory. How is the representation of a visual item compared with the representations of items in the memory set? Predominant theories would propose a role for visual working memory (VWM) either as the site of the comparison or as a conduit between visual and memory systems. In seven experiments, we loaded VWM in different ways and found little or no effect on hybrid search performance.

Searching for the right word: Hybrid visual and memory search for words.

In "hybrid search" (Wolfe Psychological Science, 23(7), 698-703, 2012), observers search through visual space for any of multiple targets held in memory. With photorealistic objects as the stimuli, response times (RTs) increase linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the memory set size, even when over 100 items are committed to memory. It is well-established that pictures of objects are particularly easy to memorize (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 14325-14329, 2008).