ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2020
Distraction biases working memory for faces.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Does artificiality matter? Comparing working memory performance for artificial and real faces.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Memory recall errors reflect interacting sensory and mnemonic representations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Distractor-Induced Repulsion Effect in Visual Working Memory: A Behavioral and ERP Study.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Memory recall errors reflect interacting sensory and mnemonic representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Signal Intrusion Explains Divergent Effects of Visual Distraction on Working Memory.Psychological science · 2025Article
- Neural Dynamics of Reselecting Visual and Motor Contents in Working Memory after External Interference.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Perceptual comparisons induce lasting and generalizing changes to face memory reports.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Integration of history information Drives Serial Dependence and Stabilizes Working Memory Representations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The differential impact of face distractors on visual working memory across encoding and delay stages.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Continuity fields enhance visual perception through positive serial dependence.Nature reviews. Psychology · 2024Article
- Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Bend but don't break: Prioritization protects working memory from displacement but leaves it vulnerable to distortion from distraction.Cognition · 2023Article
- Are irrelevant items actively deleted from visual working memory?: No evidence from repulsion and attraction effects in dual-retrocue tasks.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- Prioritization sharpens working memories but does not protect them from distraction.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Effects of Attention Direction and Perceptual Distraction Within Visual Working Memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Shielding working-memory representations from temporally predictable external interference.Cognition · 2021Article
- Distraction in Visual Working Memory: Resistance is Not Futile.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.