Beyond the single template: How working memory guides visual search for multiple targets

Visual search for known objects is guided by attentional templates, i.e., target representations that are held in visual working memory. In this talk, I will present a series of experiments from our lab investigating the capacity of such attentional templates, that is, how many templates can be activated in parallel, and how this relates to visual working memory capacity. In our experiments, we found that search for multiple colours was less efficient than search for a single colour. Yet, these costs, particularly at the neuronal level, were surprisingly small and even with two differently coloured targets, search proceeded rapidly and in parallel. These findings challenge single-template accounts and instead support the idea of mutual inhibitory interactions between simultaneously activated templates. I will provide further evidence for this hypothesis by showing that template activation in preparation for search was virtually identical whether participants prepared for one, two, or even three target colours. Finally, I will share ongoing work suggesting that individual differences in visual working memory capacity predict search performance, highlighting a direct link between visual working memory and attentional template capacity.