Abstract
The temporal dynamics of visual working memory (VWM) consolidation are the subject of conflicting results, with masking paradigms suggesting rapid consolidation but the attentional blink suggesting that consolidation may take hundreds of milliseconds. Nieuwenstein and Wyble (JEP: General, 2014) showed retroactive interference by a speeded 2-alternative forced-choice parity judgment during the VWM delay on VWM consolidation (VWM sample: 4 letters). This effect lasted even longer than the AB—up to at least 1 second. This result presents another conflicting finding on the time course of VWM consolidation, and also contradicts the typical dual-task finding of proactive interference by VWM consolidation on a subsequent task. Here, we sought to establish the boundary conditions of retroactive interference on VWM consolidation in 3 experiments. After closely replicating the retroactive interference effects on VWM consolidation (Experiment 1), we demonstrated that response demands do not explain the results by shifting from whole-report to change-detection paradigms (Experiment 2). Specifically, when participants completed randomly intermixed single- and dual-task trials, we observed a significant interaction between delay duration and the presence of a second task, exactly as in whole-report. We hypothesized that obtaining retroactive interference instead of proactive interference might be driven by the relative prioritization of the speeded parity judgment over the unspeeded VWM task. Thus, Experiment 3 decreased parity judgment priority by making the responses unspeeded. This change in task prioritization abolished the interaction between delay duration and the presence of a second task, consistent with our hypothesis. In the future, we will use direct manipulations of task priority (differential allocation of points and inter-trial delays to parity or VWM performance) as a stronger test of our account.