Abstract
Rationale. The sensory recruitment hypothesis posits that Visual Working Memory (VWM) maintenance depends on the same cortical machinery responsible for online perception, implying similarity between perceptual and VWM representations. Characterizing similarities and differences in these representations is critical for understanding how the brain reformats perceptions into durable working memories. Goal. Here, we investigated whether transient modulations to perception via exogenous attention are preserved after VWM encoding. A stimulus viewed with exogenous attention appears higher in contrast than it is, but this change in perceived contrast disappears with the decay of exogenous attention (~500ms after cue onset). If these transient dynamics continue after exogenously attended perceptual representations are encoded into VWM, then the boost to apparent contrast should fade over a delay period. Alternatively, if the encoding process freezes ongoing modulations, maintaining a snapshot of the perception from the time of encoding, then the boost to apparent contrast should persist. Method. Observers performed a delayed contrast comparison task. On each trial, a Gabor stimulus was briefly presented and after a variable delay period (500 or 2000ms), a comparison Gabor was presented. Participants reported which Gabor was higher in contrast. Exogenous attention was manipulated through cues that appeared above the location of the first, second, or both stimuli 100ms before their onset. Results. When the first stimulus was viewed during exogenous attention,the attentional boost to perceived contrast persisted across both delay periods to the same extent. In other words, VWM consistently sustained the attentional effect on representation present at the time of encoding. Conclusion. This finding reveals that VWM representations differ from percepts in terms of WVM’s robustness against transient changes. VWM maintains a snapshot of the percept as it was at the encoding time rather than preserving the transient modulations characteristic of exogenous attention on perception.