Repulsion bias is insensitive to spatial attention, yet expands during active working memory maintenance

Abstract

Our brain sometimes represents visual information in a biased manner. Multiple visual features presented simultaneously or sequentially may interact with each other when we perceive them or maintain them in visual working memory (WM), giving rise to report bias. How goal-directed attention influences target representation is not fully understood, especially concerning whether attention towards distractors modulates report bias for the target. Our study investigated the WM biases of the target when it is concurrent with (1) one attended distractor only, (2) one unattended distractor only, and (3) both kinds of distractors during perception. It was found that the target WM is reported as being repelled away from concurrent distractors, attended or unattended, suggesting attention is not necessary for the occurrence of repulsion bias during perception. Furthermore, goal-directed attention towards the distractors modulates the strength of interitem interaction, and the repulsion bias was found to be stronger when attention was directed toward the distractor than when it was not. However, the exaggerated repulsion associated with the attended distractor is likely due to increased relevance to the memory task and (or) WM load instead of spatial attention. In contrast, spatial attention towards the distractor increases the chances of misreporting the distractor for the target.