Distraction in Visual Working Memory: Resistance is Not Futile

A complete understanding of working memory function in a world full of distraction requires a careful examination of the neural evidence for mechanisms of distraction resistance. Recent advances in testing and modeling behavioral distraction effects in working memory have led to a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which representations can be affected by task-irrelevant information. Sophisticated measurement methods and analyses that can track the contents of working memory have revealed a diverse array of storage mechanisms and neural substrates, which may differ meaningfully in their distraction resistance properties. Control processes that actively inhibit distractor interference and flexibly adapt storage processes are key contributors to the remarkable resilience of working memory performance. Over half a century of research focused on understanding how working memory is capacity constrained has overshadowed the fact that it is also remarkably resistant to interference. Protecting goal-relevant information from distraction is a cornerstone of cognitive function that involves a multifaceted collection of control processes and storage mechanisms. Here, we discuss recent advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that have produced new insights into the nature of visual working memory and its ability to resist distraction. We propose that distraction resistance should be an explicit component in any model of working memory and that understanding its behavioral and neural correlates is essential for building a comprehensive understanding of real-world memory function. Over half a century of research focused on understanding how working memory is capacity constrained has overshadowed the fact that it is also remarkably resistant to interference. Protecting goal-relevant information from distraction is a cornerstone of cognitive function that involves a multifaceted collection of control processes and storage mechanisms. Here, we discuss recent advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that have produced new insights into the nature of visual working memory and its ability to resist distraction. We propose that distraction resistance should be an explicit component in any model of working memory and that understanding its behavioral and neural correlates is essential for building a comprehensive understanding of real-world memory function. working memory maintenance hypothesized to occur without continuous active firing, potentially via short-term synaptic plasticity that yields temporary item-specific changes in the configuration of a network of neurons. a systematic shift in a memory response toward the feature value of a distractor. For example, a green distractor would cause memory for the color yellow to be reported as greenish-yellow. memory disruption is more profound when distractors are more similar (e.g., from the same modality) to memory items; distinct from attractive biases, which operate within a single feature dimension (e.g., color). a class of working memory tests that offers a more detailed measure of memory quality, compared with discrete ‘change detection’ tasks. A remembered feature value (e.g., reddish-orange) is reported by choosing it from a continuous space that spans all possible values (e.g., all 360° of color space); also called ‘delayed-estimation’. distractors presented during a working memory retention interval that provide visual input (e.g., pictures of faces), but do not require the completion of a secondary task. a primary working memory task must be completed along with an interposed task. To the extent that shared control processes are required for both tasks, distractor interference can arise at the level of memory representations, and/or at the control level. process by which new information is selectively encoded (or blocked from encoding) into working memory, so that limited capacity can be preserved for goal-relevant information. Gating policies are thought to be set via reinforcement learning mechanisms. response errors in a continuous report task are modeled as deriving from a mixture of multiple distributions. In the simplest case, one distribution reflects responses to items that were successfully remembered, and another reflects random guesses about items that were forgotten. interference of previously learned information in the acquisition and retrieval of newer information. population-level memory representations are very high dimensional if each neuron carries unique information. However, if the same information is represented across multiple neurons, the representation can be described with fewer dimensions, that is, a ‘subspace’ that still contains the remembered information. a ‘retrospective cue’ that directs internal attention to a subset of items in memory. Given that the cue appears during the retention interval, any differences between cued and uncued items cannot reflect differences in encoding quality. a theory about the neural substrate of working memory storage: the same cortical regions responsible for perceptual processing are recruited for high-fidelity memory maintenance. perception and maintenance of novel stimuli are influenced by recently perceived stimuli, that is, consecutive trials are serially dependent on one another.