ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2021
Controlling the Flow of Distracting Information in Working Memory.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring Neural Mechanisms Underlying Error-related Impairments in Active Working Memory Suggests an Adaptive Shielding of Contents during Cognitive Control.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Content-Independent Pointers Mediate Working Memory Storage for Both Visual and Verbal Stimuli.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Older adults are impaired by distractors presented during working memory encoding.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Posttraumatic stress symptomatology rather than mild traumatic brain injury is related to atypical early neural processing during cognitive control.Neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Age-related decline in source and associative memory.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- Electroencephalogram Decoding Reveals Distinct Processes for Directing Spatial Attention and Encoding Into Working Memory.Psychological science · 2024Article
- Manipulating attentional priority creates a trade-off between memory and sensory representations in human visual cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Influence of presentation duration on filtering of irrelevant stimuli in visual working memory.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Online and offline effects of parietal 10 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on working memory in healthy controls.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Exploring the association of mindfulness, confidence, competitive state anxiety, and attention control in soccer penalty shootouts.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Dimension-based retro-cue benefit in working memory does not require unfocused dimension removal.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Prioritization sharpens working memories but does not protect them from distraction.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Contralateral delay activity, but not alpha lateralization, indexes prioritization of information for working memory storage.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2023Article
- β-Bursts over Frontal Cortex Track the Surprise of Unexpected Events in Auditory, Visual, and Tactile Modalities.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Is There an Activity-silent Working Memory?Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Active Working Memory and Simple Cognitive Operations.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Shielding working-memory representations from temporally predictable external interference.Cognition · 2021Article
- Inter-electrode correlations measured with EEG predict individual differences in cognitive ability.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Visual working memory (WM) must maintain relevant information, despite the constant influx of both relevant and irrelevant information. Attentional control mechanisms help determine which of this new information gets access to our capacity-limited WM system. Previous work has treated attentional control as a monolithic process-either distractors capture attention or they are suppressed. Here, we provide evidence that attentional capture may instead be broken down into at least two distinct subcomponent processes: (1) Spatial capture, which refers to when spatial attention shifts towards the location of irrelevant stimuli and (2) item-based capture, which refers to when item-based WM representations of irrelevant stimuli are formed. To dissociate these two subcomponent processes of attentional capture, we utilized a series of electroencephalography components that track WM maintenance (contralateral delay activity), suppression (distractor positivity), item individuation (N2pc), and spatial attention (lateralized alpha power). We show that new, relevant information (i.e., a task-relevant distractor) triggers both spatial and item-based capture. Irrelevant distractors, however, only trigger spatial capture from which ongoing WM representations can recover more easily. This fractionation of attentional capture into distinct subcomponent processes provides a refined framework for understanding how distracting stimuli affect attention and WM.
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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.