ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2023
Prioritization sharpens working memories but does not protect them from distraction.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2023. 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.
- Working Memory States Modulate Arithmetic Estimation Strategy Processing: Evidence from Visual and Articulatory Interference.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Reward-based prioritization and perceptual feature effects on attentional flexibility in working memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- The consequences of strategic prioritization in working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Color-semantic congruency boosts distractor resistance in visual working memory: an alpha-band oscillation perspective.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Refreshing boosts memory but does not protect it against interference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- When similarity is less disruptive: feature-sharing distractors in visual working memory under diffuse attention.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Article
- Reward-based prioritization in working memory is distinct from recency and due to a resource trade-off.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Visual working memory prioritization modulates serial dependence beyond simple attentional effects.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Temporal attention modulates distraction resistance of visual working memory representations.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Signal Intrusion Explains Divergent Effects of Visual Distraction on Working Memory.Psychological science · 2025Article
- What are the benefits of directed attention within verbal working memory?Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2025Article
- Getting value out of working memory through strategic prioritisation: Implications for storage and control.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2025Review
- An Examination of Distractor Susceptibility of Prioritized and Unprioritized Information in Visual Working Memory.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- 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
- Mapping visual working memory models to a theoretical framework.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Perceptual distraction distorts visual working memory representations. Previous research has shown that memory responses are systematically biased toward visual distractors that are similar to the memoranda. However, it remains unclear whether the prioritization of one working memory representation over another reduces the impact of perceptual distractors. In five behavioral experiments, we used different forms of retrospective cues (indicating the likelihood of testing each item and/or the reward for responding correctly to each item) to manipulate the prioritization of items in working memory before visual distraction. We examined the effects of distraction with nonparametric analyses and a novel distractor intrusion model. We found that memory responses were more precise (lower absolute response errors and stronger memory signals) for items that were prioritized. However, these prioritized items were not immune to distraction, and their memory responses were biased toward the visual distractors to the same degree as were unprioritized items. Our findings demonstrate that the benefits associated with prioritization in working memory do not include protection from distraction biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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