Perceptual competition between targets and distractors determines working memory access and produces intrusion errors in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks.

When a target and a distractor that share the same response dimension appear in rapid succession, participants often erroneously report the distractor instead of the target. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, we examined whether these intrusion errors occur because the target is often not encoded in working memory (WM) or are generated at later postencoding stages. In 4 experiments, participants either provided two guesses about the target’s identity, or had to select the target among items that did not include the potential intruder. Results showed that the target did not gain access to WM on a substantial number of trials where the distractor was encoded. This was also confirmed with an electrophysiological marker of WM storage (CDA component). These findings are inconsistent with postencoding accounts of distractor intrusions, which postulate that competitive interactions within WM impair awareness of the target, the precision of target representations, or result in the target being dropped from WM. They show instead that target-distractor competition already operates at earlier perceptual stages, and reduces the likelihood that the target gains access to WM. We provide a theoretical framework to explain these findings and how they challenge contemporary models of temporal attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)Public Significance Statement: When a target and distractors are presented in rapid succession at the same location, participants often mistakenly report one of these distractors as being the target. These distractor intrusions reflect a robust limitation of attentional control in the time domain. Our study suggests that distractor intrusions are caused by competitive interactions during perceptual processing that can block the target’s access to working memory.