Abstract
Attention enables us to prioritise and shift between sources of information, whether present in the external world, or stored as internal representations. While ample research has targeted the mechanisms of shifting attention either in perception (the external domain), or within memory (the internal domain), how attention transitions from perception to memory and vice versa remains largely unexplored. Here, we developed a novel task to capture the moment when participants shifted attention between two of four visual items - two being held in working memory, with two more anticipated in a subsequent perceptual display. This task allowed us to compare the effects of shifting within versus between the internal and external attentional domains. First, we show higher performance costs associated with shifting between domains than shifting within a domain. In addition, we used multivariate decoding of magnetencephalography data to individuate neural information linked to within- and between-domain shifts. We could not only decode the current attentional domain, but also whether participants shifted within the same or between different domains. This was the case irrespective of whether shifting from working memory to perception or vice versa. Finally, we found evidence that the decodability of both the current attentional domain and the type of shift were related to subsequent behavioural performance. Taken together, our findings uncover the behavioural consequences and neural processes associated with shifting attention between perception and working memory, and reveal how these differ from shifting attention within a domain.