Can you have multiple attentional templates? Large-scale replications of Van Moorselaar, Theeuwes, and Olivers (2014) and Hollingworth and Beck (2016)

Stimuli that resemble the content of visual working memory (VWM) capture attention. However, theories disagree on how manyVWM items can bias attention simultaneously. According to some theories, there is a distinction between active and passive statesin VWM, such that only items held in an active state can bias attention. The single-item-template hypothesis holds that only oneitem can be in an active state and thus can biasattention. In contrast, the multiple-item-template hypothesis posits that multipleVWM items can be in an activate state simultaneously, and thus can bias attention. Recently, Van Moorselaar, Theeuwes, andOlivers (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,40(4):1450,2014) and Hollingworth andBeck (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,42(7):911–917,2016) tested these accounts, butobtained seemingly contradictory results. Van Moorselaar et al. (2014) found that a distractor in a visual-search task capturedattention more when it matched the content of VWM (memory-driven capture). Crucially, memory-driven capture disappearedwhen more than one item was held in VWM, in line with the single-item-template hypothesis. In contrast, Hollingworth and Beck(2016) found memory-driven capture even when multiple items were kept in VWM, in line with the multiple-item-templatehypothesis. Considering these mixed results, we replicated both studies with a larger sample, and found that all key results arereliable. It is unclear to what extent these divergent results are due to paradigm differences between the studies. We conclude that iscrucial to our understanding of VWM to determine the boundary conditions under which memory-driven capture occurs