Distraction biases working memory for faces.

Psychon Bull Rev

Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.

Published: April 2020

Working memory persists in the face of distraction, yet not without consequence. Previous research has shown that memory for low-level visual features is systematically influenced by the maintenance or presentation of a similar distractor stimulus. Responses are frequently biased in stimulus space towards a perceptual distractor, though this has yet to be determined for high-level stimuli. We investigated whether these influences are shared for complex visual stimuli such as faces. To quantify response accuracies for these stimuli, we used a delayed-estimation task with a computer-generated "face space" consisting of 80 faces that varied continuously as a function of age and sex. In a set of three experiments, we found that responses for a target face held in working memory were biased towards a distractor face presented during the maintenance period. The amount of response bias did not vary as a function of distance between target and distractor. Our data suggest that, similar to low-level visual features, high-level face representations in working memory are biased by the processing of related but task-irrelevant information.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7101264PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-019-01707-5DOI Listing

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