The Impact of Distractors on Retro-Cue Benefits in Visual Working Memory

The visual working memory capacity is limited, and the task-related visual information must be selected by attention for encoding and maintenance. Retro-cues guide internal attention to selectively focus on relevant mental representations in visual working memory.Memory representations cued by retro-cues show both qualitative and quantitative improvements compared to uncued representation, a phenomenon known as retro-cue benefit.Many researchers have used retro-cue paradigms with change detection tasks or recall tasks to examine the impact of interference on retro-cue benefit, but the conclusions in this area are still controversial. This paper mainly reviews previous studies, and puts forward four possible influencing factors (interference type, interference source, timing of interference, and cue type) to explain the reasons for the different results of previous studies, and develop a cognitive model of how interference affects retro-cue benefit.