Limitations in the ability to temporarily represent information in visual working memory (VWM) are crucial for visual cognition. Whether VWM processing is dependent on an object’s saliency (i.e., how much it stands out) has been neglected in VWM research. Therefore, we developed a novel VWM task that allows direct control over saliency. In three experiments with this task (on 10, 31, and 60 adults, respectively), we consistently found that VWM performance is strongly and parametrically influenced by saliency and that both an object’s relative saliency (compared with concurrently presented objects) and absolute saliency influence VWM processing. We also demonstrated that this effect is indeed due to bottom-up saliency rather than differential fit between each object and the top-down attentional template. A simple computational model assuming that VWM performance is determined by the weighted sum of absolute and relative saliency accounts well for the observed data patterns.

在视觉工作记忆 (VWM) 中暂时表示信息的能力的限制对于视觉认知至关重要。VWM 处理是否依赖于对象的显着性（即它突出的程度）在 VWM 研究中被忽略了。因此，我们开发了一个新颖的 VWM 任务，可以直接控制显着性。在此任务的三个实验中（分别针对 10、31 和 60 个成年人），我们一致发现 VWM 性能受到显着性的强烈和参数化影响，并且对象的相对显着性（与同时呈现的对象相比）和绝对显着性影响VWM 处理。我们还证明了这种效果确实是由于自下而上的显着性，而不是每个对象与自上而下的注意模板之间的差异拟合。