The Reactivation of working memory representations affects attentional guidance

Abstract Recent studies have suggested that the neural activity that supported working memory (WM) storage is dynamic over time and this dynamic storage decides memory performance. Does the temporal dynamic of the WM representation also affect visual search, and how does it interact with distractor suppression over time? To address these issues, we tracked the time course of the reactivation of WM representations during visual search by analyzing the electroencephalogram (EEG) and event‐related optical signals (EROS) in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively, and investigated the interaction between the representation reactivation and distractor suppression in Experiment 3. Participants had to maintain a color in WM under high‐ or low‐precision requirement and perform a subsequent search task. The reactivation of WM representations was defined by the above‐chance decoding accuracy. The EEG results showed that compared with the low‐precision requirement, WM‐matching distractors captured more attention and the WM representation were reactivated more frequently under high‐precision requirement. The EROS results showed that compared with the low‐precision requirement, the increased activity in occipital cortex in the WM‐matching versus WM‐mismatching conditions was observed at 224 ms during visual search under high‐precision requirement. Regression analysis showed that the representation reactivation during visual search directly predicted the behavioral WM‐based attentional capture effect, while the representation reactivation before visual search impacted the WM‐based attentional capture effect through the mediation of distractor suppression during visual search. These results suggest that the reactivation of WM representations and distractor suppression collectively determine WM‐based attentional capture.