The maintenance of information in visual working memory has been shown to bias the concurrent processing in favor of matching visual input. The present study aimed to examine whether this bias can act at an early stage of processing to enhance target feature perception in single-item displays. Participants were sequentially presented with two distinct colored stimuli as memory samples and a retro-cue indicating which of the two samples should be maintained for subsequent memory test. During the retention interval, they had to discriminate the gap orientation of a Landolt target presented through a single visual stimulus that could match one or neither of the two samples. Across two experiments, we consistently found that discrimination performance was more accurate when the Landolt target was situated within a stimulus that matched the sample being retained in visual working memory, as compared with when the target was not. This effect cannot be attributed to the mechanism of passive priming, because we failed to observe priming effects when the stimulus containing the target matched the sample that was retro-cued to be irrelevant to the working memory task, as compared to when the stimulus matched neither sample. Given the fact that target stimuli were presented in single-item displays wherein external noise was precluded, the present findings demonstrate that the working memory bias of visual attention operating in the absence of stimulus competition facilitates early perceptual processing at the attended location via signal enhancement.

中文翻译：

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视觉工作记忆通过单项显示提高了目标识别的准确性。

视觉工作记忆中信息的维护已被证明会使并发处理偏向于匹配视觉输入。本研究旨在检查这种偏差是否可以在处理的早期阶段起作用，以增强单项显示中的目标特征感知。参与者依次呈现两种不同颜色的刺激作为记忆样本和一个复古提示，指示应该保留两个样本中的哪一个用于后续的记忆测试。在保留间隔期间，他们必须区分通过单个视觉刺激呈现的 Landolt 目标的间隙方向，该视觉刺激可以匹配两个样本中的一个或两个。在两次实验中，我们一致发现，当 Landolt 目标位于与保留在视觉工作记忆中的样本匹配的刺激中时，与目标不在时相比，辨别性能更准确。这种效应不能归因于被动启动的机制，因为当包含目标的刺激与回溯提示与工作记忆任务无关的样本匹配时，我们未能观察到启动效应，而当刺激不匹配时，我们未能观察到启动效应样本。鉴于目标刺激以单项显示呈现，其中排除了外部噪声，