Does the magnitude of attractive bias in visual working memory depend on the strength of the distractor trace?

Visual working memory (VWM) operates as the short-term storage for the maintenance and manipulation of visual information. We rely on VWM to aid us in navigating our complex visual environments and in performing goal-directed behaviour. When attempting to change lanes while driving for instance, we internally represent items that can not be directly sampled from the environment, like the position of a car in our blind spot. VWM is highly effective at supporting our behaviour, but its contents are vulnerable to distortion from visual distraction. Uniquely, when this distraction shares a feature dimension with a representation in VWM (e.g., a blue target in VWM and a red distractor), this distortion is systematic, the representation is attracted towards the features of the distractor (i.e., the blue target would be remembered and reported as a shade of purple). This phenomenon is called attractive bias, and has been displayed in several feature dimensions like colour, orientation, and spatial frequency. Though attractive bias has been repeatedly demonstrated across a multitude of paradigms and feature dimensions, much of its precise etiology remains underexamined. Attractive bias may either reflect a fundamental change in the VWM representation or, alternatively, arise from a lingering distractor memory trace that taints the response at the time of report. The current study aims to test these hypotheses by manipulating the strength of the distractor memory trace, and assessing the magnitude of attractive bias in reports.