Vigilant and Prepared: Working Memory-Driven Attentional Capture by Task-Irrelevant Threat Is Contingent Upon Action Preparation

Threat-associated stimuli can capture our attention even when they are task-irrelevant. It has, however, not been determined whether this interference can be caused by background threat-detection goals active in visual working memory (VWM). To test this, five dual-task combined visual search and VWM change detection task experiments were run (4/5 pre-registered; total N = 119), in which participants had to detect the change in either positive (kitten) or threat-related (spider) animal exemplars across a trial, whilst performing an intervening visual search task with peripheral distractors from these affective categories. It was hypothesised that threat-related spider and positive kitten distractors would disrupt search efficiency more, versus a neutral (bird or no distractor) baseline, when congruent with the contents of VWM. Experiments 1a, 2, and 3, however, found no evidence of increased capture by VWM-matching affective stimuli, despite cumulative evidence across all experiments of goal-independent value-driven interference by spiders, and a separate self-report rating study (Experiment 1b; n = 82) confirming the distractors’ affective associations. When, however, the trial structure became unpredictable, requiring constant preparation for the VWM task response (Experiment 4), or advanced action preparation to the VWM task was enabled (Experiment 5), then VWM-matching threat-related distractors caused greater interference – though these results were absent for positive distractors. The results provide evidence for distinct goal-driven and value-driven attentional capture by threat; and suggests that a background goal-driven mechanism may operate depending on varying states of action preparation and prioritisation in VWM, rather than task-relevance amplifying affective perceptual inputs.