PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Visual search for varying targets requires maintaining a target template in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, we showed that not only relevant, but also search-irrelevant features of a VWM template bias attention in an object-based way. Here we investigated the role of target-distractor similarity. Participants had to saccade to a target appearing left or right opposite a distractor. The target was defined by a single feature dimension (e.g. shape) indicated by a preceding cue. However, the search cue also varied in another feature dimension (e.g. color), which the distractor shared in half of the trials known by subjects. Matching distractors captured the eyes more often than non-matching distractors. The magnitude of this attentional bias was modulated by target-distractor similarity in both feature dimensions. Results argue for involuntary and object-based top-down control by VWM templates and effects of target-distractor similarity of all feature dimensions.