Persistent effects of salience in visual working memory: Limits of cue-driven guidance

Visual working memory (VWM) is a core cognitive system enabling us to select and briefly store relevant visual information. We recently observed that more salient items were recalled more precisely from VWM and demonstrated that these effects of salience resisted manipulations of reward, probability, and selection history. Here, we investigated whether and how salience interacts with shifts of attention induced by pre- and retro-cueing. Across four experiments, we consistently found effects of salience on the accuracy of VWM. Spatial and feature cues presented before the memory display improved accuracy when they validly indicated the target, but valid cues failed to eliminate the salience effect. A similar pattern was observed with retro-cues. Overall, there was little evidence that the lower accuracy for less-salient stimuli could be compensated by increasing their attentional priority through cueing procedures. This suggests that salience plays a critical role in how items are initially encoded into VWM and that once representations are formed, their relative priority based on salience appears difficult to fully override via top-down priority. These findings highlight bottom-up and top-down processes in the interplay of visual attention and working memory.