Signal intrusion explains divergent effects of visual distraction on working memory

Perceptual distraction distorts visual working memories. Recent research has shown divergenteffects of distraction on memory performance, including attractive biases, impairing memoryprecision, and increasing guess rate, indicating multiple mechanisms of distraction interferences.Here, we propose a novel signal intrusion model (TCC-Intrusion) to reconcile those discrepantresults. We hypothesized that sensory interference is driven by the integration of a target signaland an intrusive distractor signal. Model comparisons showed that TCC-Intrusion had a superiorfit to memory error distributions across three delayed-estimation tasks with distraction (N = 220)compared to other candidate models. According to the model, distractor intrusions decreasedalong with target-distractor dissimilarity, in accordance with the sensory recruitment hypothesis.Moreover, TCC-Intrusion successfully replicated divergent effects of distraction on memorybias, precision, and guess using this one intrusion mechanism. Together, these results suggestthat perceptual distractors affect working memories through a unified mechanism of signalintrusion.