Original title: The Behavioral Cost of Memory-Driven Attentional Capture: Eye-Movement Evidence for Post-Capture Attentional Dwell
Keyang Liu, Chen Wang, Qiang Liu · September 2026
When you search for something, objects that match an image held in your mind can pull your focus away. Scientists wanted to understand what happens right after your eyes land on such a distracting item. They tracked eye movements while people held an item in memory and searched for a target. They found that distractors matching a stored memory drew the first eye gaze more often than neutral items, slowing down total search time. Crucially, when people looked at these memory-matching distractors, their eyes stayed stuck on them longer. People with higher working memory capacityHow much information you can hold in mind at once. did not avoid looking first, but they were quicker to look away. Distraction hurts not just because you look, but because your eyes linger.
Imagine you are looking for your friend in a crowded café. You have a mental image of their red hat. Your eyes dart to anyone wearing red, even if it's not your friend. Once you look at a stranger with a red hat, you hesitate for a moment to confirm it's not them—that hesitation costs time. In this paper, the red hat is a memory-matching distractor, and the hesitation after looking is the post-capture dwell that adds to search time.
For anyone who searches for things—radiologists scanning X-rays, drivers spotting hazards—this shows that distraction isn't just about first glance. Even after your eyes land on something irrelevant, it can hold your attention longer if it matches what you're holding in mind. People with higher working memory capacity recover faster, suggesting a cognitive skill that might be trainable.
The abstract does not establish whether the post-capture dwell is caused by memory matching or is a consequence of other factors. It also does not test whether these findings generalize to other types of distractors or real-world tasks. The WMC association is correlational, not causal.
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The Behavioral Cost of Memory-Driven Attentional Capture: Eye-Movement Evidence for Post-Capture Attentional Dwell — Keyang Liu, Chen Wang, Qiang Liu — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/fkt9c_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.