Spatial Attention in Visual Working Memory Strengthens Feature-Location Binding

Abstract

There is a debate about whether working memory (WM) representations are individual features or bound objects. While spatial attention is reported to play a significant role in feature binding, little is known about the role of spatial attention in WM. To address this gap, the current study required participants to maintain multiple items in their WM and employed a memory-driven attention capture paradigm. Spatial attention in WM was manipulated by presenting an exogenous cue at one of the locations that memory items had occupied. The effects of spatial attention on attention guidance in visual search (Experiment 1) and memory performance (Experiments 1 and 2) were explored. The results show that WM-driven attention guidance did not vary based on whether the search features came from the same object in WM; instead, it depended on the number of features, regardless of their source object. In memory tasks, the cued object outperformed the uncued object. Specifically, the test item was better rejected when the features were mis-bound in the cued location than in the uncued location. These findings suggest that memory-driven attention guidance is feature-based, and spatial attention in WM helps bind features into object structures based on location.