Abstract
The history of attentional deployment induces attentional bias. In the current study, we investigated whether eye-specific attentional selection within visual short-term memory (VSTM) can bias attention in an eye-specific manner. Participants encoded two Gabor patches presented to the left and right visual field of each eye using a binocular rivalry paradigm. During the retention period, a retro cue appeared to indicate the to-be-tested item. After selecting the item within VSTM, in a subset of trials, participants were required to respond to a probe that could be presented to either left or right eye. Though the participants were unaware of the eye-of-origin of the probe, their response was significantly faster when the probe appeared to the same eye where the previously selected VSTM item was presented to. This result implies that attention is biased involuntary in an eye-specific manner during VSTM retention. The current finding further suggests that VSTM retention might recruit the visual pathway where selective attention was required during the encoding period.