Holding the product of visual working memory integration: The role of attention

The involuntary integration of discrete fragments into meaningful units (e.g., Gestalt) within visual working memory (VWM) is a crucial process in mind. However, the mechanisms governing the maintenance of these integrated products within VWM have remained largely unexplored. The current study sought to address this gap by investigating whether maintaining such VWM integration products places a greater demand on attention resources compared to discrete representations. We hypothesized that maintenance may be costless or require additional attention, which may be domain-specific or domain-general. To examine these hypotheses, we tested whether the emerged Gestalts by VWM integration can be abolished by an attention consumption task. Participants were required to memorize a sequence of oriented disks with or without Gestalt cues, alongside a secondary task during maintenance, consuming a specific type of attention. We found that a task consuming spatial attention impaired the VWM Gestalts of bar contours (Experiments 1 and 3), but not the Gestalts of square contours (Experiment 2). Moreover, a task consuming domain-general attention did not affect the VWM Gestalts of bar contours (Experiment 4). These findings provide evidence suggesting that maintaining VWM integration products requires more attention than discrete representations and that the type of attention required is domain-specific.