Does selective attention filter out distractor information in visual working memory storage?
” Perception 34 ECVP Abstract Supplement Does selective attention filter out distractor information in visual working memory storage? J R Vidal, H L Gauchou, J K O’Regan, C Tallon-Baudry Visual working memory (VWM) capacity has been estimated to be limited to up to 3 – 4 visual items (Luck and Vogel, 1997 Nature 390 279 – 281). Memory load can be reduced by selecting only targets while ignoring distractors. Selective attention is considered to filter out distractors to limit the amount of information processing at higher-order perceptive and cognitive stages. Recently, it has been shown that selective attention depends on perceptual load to filter out distractors in an early or a late selection modality (Lavie, 2005 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21 451 – 468; 1995 Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 75 – 82). Is this true for VWM storage? If distractors are not filtered out from VWM storage we would expect them to interfere with target memory retrieval
