ABSTRACT

Imagine you are in love and the memory of your beloved is constantly active in your thoughts. Your task requires that you focus attention on your computer screen; despite it being detrimental to the task, you cannot avoid attending to the picture of your loved one placed on the desk nearby. This example shows how the contents of working memory (WM) can capture visual attention. The aim of the current study is to investigate the neural mechanisms that give rise to such phenomena. Over the last 20 years, there has been active study of the mechanisms involved in memory-based guidance of visual attention. This work has led to the development of the influential biased competition model of visual selection. In contrast, visual selection can be modulated automatically by repetition priming from stimuli of which we are not aware. One possibility is that WM and repetition priming use common neural mechanisms to guide and bias selection.