Distractors induce space-specific neural biases in visual working memory
Information in working memory is remarkably resilient to distraction. Yet, recent evidence suggests that distractors containing task-relevant features can disrupt working memory by inducing subtle biases in mnemonic representations. With multivariate decoding of human electroencephalography recordings, we show that temporally unpredictable distractors produce spatially-antagonistic mnemonic biases, across the visual hemifields. Grating distractors produced either an attractive or a repulsive mnemonic bias -- a shift in the neural representation of the memorandum toward or away from the distractor's orientation -- depending, respectively, on whether the distractor appeared in the same hemifield as the memorandum, or opposite to it. Behavioral biases closely tracked these neural effects. We devised a two-tier ring attractor model with cross-hemifield inhibition, which comprehensively explains how the distractor's timing, encoding strength, and input gating control these mnemonic biases. Our results provide a mechanistic account of distractor-induced biases, across space and time, in visual working memory.