How attention and working memory married and divorced, with Journal of Experimental Psychology

How do we find stuff that we are looking for? This question has been central to many a study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. We describe how seminal studies in the journal eventually led to the hypothesis that top-down attentional guidance and visual working memory activation might be regarded as one and the same process. However, crucial tests revealed a more complex picture, raising important new questions about potential functional divisions within working memory, and how these should be characterized. This contributed to wider debates within the journal on what is the capacity of top-down attention, how we ignore stuff that is irrelevant, and how we switch between sensory and mnemonic representations-debates that still call for resolution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).