Abstract
When a task-irrelevant object, i.e., a distractor, was presented during a location recall task, pulling attention away from the remembered location, it created a bias in memory such that participants remembered target locations to be closer to the distractor than they actually were (Van der Stigchel et al., 2007). Recent studies in children and adults using similar tasks found that distractors presented during the delay resulted in repulsion from the distractor, such that targets were remembered as further from the distractor (Schutte et al., 2017; Schutte & DeGirolamo, 2020). Beattie et al. (2018) found that inhibitory control (IC) was related to spatial working memory (SWM) biases in children such that greater IC was related to greater repulsion (Beattie et al., 2018). We examined whether IC is related to SWM in adults. Eighty-four adults completed the Spaceship SWM task, a location recall task in which a target was presented at one of two locations that varied by condition. In two-thirds of the trials, distractors were presented near the target. The IC measures included a Cued Go/No-Go (CGNG) task, Simon task, Color Stroop task, and the Barrett Impulsiveness Scale (BIS). Analyses of no-distractor trials found that (a) lower error rates in the CGNG task were related to smaller memory biases away from midline, a common bias in SWM (Spencer & Hund, 2002), suggesting people with greater inhibitory control were less biased; (b) participants who scored lower on the BIS and had higher error rates on the CGNG showed greater memory biases away from midline. This relationship varied by condition. Analyses of no-distractor trials found that individuals with lower error rates in the CGNG task, were repulsed more by the distractor than those with higher errors rates. Overall, these effects demonstrated that IC is related to SWM in adults.