Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Visual Working Memory Modulates Within-object Metrics of Saccade Landing Position

In two experiments, we examined the influence of visual working memory (VWM) on oculomotor selection, testing whether the landing positions of rapidly generated saccades are biased toward the region of an object that matches a feature held in VWM. Participants executed a saccade to the center of a single saccade target, divided into two colored regions and presented on the horizontal midline. Concurrently, participants maintained a color in VWM for an unrelated memory task. This color either matched one of the two regions or neither of the regions. Relative to the no-match baseline, the landing positions of rapidly generated saccades (mean latency < 150 ms) were biased toward the region that matched the remembered color. The results support the hypothesis that VWM modulates early, spatially organized sensory representations to bias selection toward locations with features that match VWM content. In addition, the results demonstrate that saccades to spatially extended objects are sensitive to within-object differences in salience.