Interactions between working memory and attention depend on remembered feature dimension

Prominent theories of visual search state that goal-relevant information is maintained in working memory (WM) to guide attention to relevant, searched-for items. Prioritization from WM is sufficiently strong to direct attention towards items that are irrelevant to current search goals. These ‘incidental capture’ results have typically been observed when remembering color or shape stimuli, but, in principle, should similarly occur using other strong guiding features such as motion. However, recent work suggests that neural representations of remembered motion directions are transformed into spatial coordinates. If so, then remembered stimuli which can easily be spatially recoded (e.g., remembered motion direction) should not interfere with visual search when feature-matching distractors are present any more than interference caused by a salient distractor that does not match the contents of WM. We replicated the traditional incidental capture finding for color: distractors matching the remembered color captured attention more than feature singletons. In contrast, when participants were required to remember a motion direction, capture was equal across distractor conditions: salient distractors captured attention, but no additional capture was observed when the remembered motion direction matched the distracting motion direction. Intriguingly, responses were faster when the search target was at a location that neural studies predict would be prioritized if remembered motion was spatially recoded. Our results indicate that some features in WM are more likely to impact attentional processing than others and that this difference in attentional capture between feature dimensions may emerge due to the ability to reformat memory representations.