Topic: antagonistic biases

Working memory (WM) enables retaining and manipulating information for brief periods. Attractor models have been developed for explaining diverse phenomena linked to WM, including error-correcting dynamics [1], cardinal repulsion [2], serial biases [3], and the like [4-5]. Yet, in the real-world, a relevant stimulus must be remembered despite interference from distractors that can occur unpredictably in time and anywhere in space. We provide novel experimental evidence, and suggest a computational mechanism, for biases induced by spatially and temporally unpredictable, task-irrelevant distract