Whether and how distractors influence our working memory?

It has been suggested that our visual system does not only process stimuli that are directly available to our eyes, but also has a role in maintaining information in VWM over a period of seconds. It remains unclear however what happens to VWM representations in the visual system when we make saccades. Here, we examined the neural consequences of eye movements for VWM representations in early visual and parietal cortex. We directly compared the content of VWM for saccade and no-saccade conditions using MVPA of delay-related activity measured with fMRI. We found that while VWM representations were robustly present in early visual cortex when participants maintained fixation, they were eradicated after making eye movements. VWM representations in the intraparietal sulcus on the other hand remained robustly present. Together, our results suggest that VWM representations in early visual cortex are erased after eye movements, potentially limiting the role of early visual cortex in VWM storage.