Attentional guidance by working memory differs by paradigm: An individual-differences approach

Abstract The contents of working memory (WM) have been repeatedly found to guide the allocation of visual attention; in a dual-task paradigm that combines WM and visual search, ac-tively holding an item in WM biases visual attention towards memory-matching items during search (e.g., Soto et al., Jour-nal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(2), 248-261, 2005). A key debate is whether such memory-based attentional guidance is automatic or under strategic control. Generally, two distinct task paradigms have been employed to assess memory-based guidance, one demon-strating that attention is involuntarily captured by memory-matching stimuli even at a cost to search performance (Soto et al., 2005), and one demonstrating that participants can stra-tegically avoid memory-matching distractors to facilitate searc