Attentional prioritisation and facilitation for similar stimuli in visual working memory

Visual working memory (VWM) allows for the brief retention of approximately three to four items. Interestingly, when these items are similar to each other in a feature domain, memory recall performance is elevated compared to when they are dissimilar. This similarity benefit is currently not accounted for by models of VWM. Previous research has suggested that this similarity benefit may arise from selective attentional prioritisation in the maintenance phase. However, the similarity effect has not been contrasted under circumstances where dissimilar item types can adequately compete for memory resources. In Experiment 1, similarity benefits were seen for all-similar over all-dissimilar displays. This was also seen in mixed displays, change detection performance was higher when one of the two similar items changed, compared to when the dissimilar item changed. Surprisingly, the similarity effect was stronger in these mixed displays then when comparing the all-similar and all-dissimilar. Experiment 2 investigated this further by examining how attention was allocated in the memory encoding phase via eye movements. Results revealed that attention prioritised similar over dissimilar items in the mixed displays. Similar items were more likely to receive the first fixation and were fixated more often than dissimilar items. Furthermore, dwell times were elongated for dissimilar items, suggesting that encoding was less efficient. These results suggest that there is an attentional strategy towards prioritising similar items over dissimilar items, and that this strategy’s influence can be observed in the memory encoding phase.