Saccades temporarily disrupt attentional filtering for visual working memory

Visual working memory (VWM) is highly capacity limited, and attention acts as a filter to ensure that goal-relevant information is encoded. While this filtering process has been well characterized under static fixation, eye movements are frequent during natural vision. Not only have eye movements been shown to disrupt perceptual processes, but the VWM filter itself has been shown to be susceptible to distraction-induced disruptions. Do eye movements similarly disrupt control over the attentional filter regulating access to VWM? Across three experiments, we tested whether the VWM filter persists across saccades or is temporarily disrupted. In a continuous report paradigm, participants remembered the colors of target-matching shapes while ignoring nontargets. Experiment 1 (no-saccade) confirmed robust filtering: performance decreased with increasing memory set size, indicating successful exclusion of nontargets. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants executed saccades before the onset of the memory display, which appeared after either a short (50 ms) or long (400 ms) post-saccade delay. Attentional filtering was ineffective immediately after a saccade but recovered by the longer delay, demonstrating a temporally-specific disruption of the VWM filter. Together, the results indicate that saccades interrupt the filter that governs VWM encoding and that attentional control must be re-established post-saccade. These findings extend the Filter Disruption Theory, showing that in addition to distraction, eye movements themselves induce a momentary loss of attentional control over VWM encoding, with implications for how visual cognition remains stable across gaze shifts.