The Time Course of Selective Consolidation on Visual Working Memory

The aim of this study is to explore the time course of the selective consolidation process. While maintaining one color, which was selected from an initially array of four colors in three different intervals, participants had to perform a visual search and ignore 1) a singleton distractor that matched the color maintained in WM, 2) a new singleton that did not match the maintained color, or 3) a uniformly colored distractor display (i.e., no singletons). After that, they should match a probe color with the maintained color. WM performance for the color was significantly impaired in the matching and new color distractor conditions relative to the uniformly distractor condition when the interval for selective consolidation was short (35 or 50 ms/item), but was identical across these three conditions when this interval was relative long (65 ms/item). This result indicated an astonishingly fast process of selection before the color consolidation process.