Everyday situations, such as walking down a busy street while trying to remember a shopping list or reading a book on public transportation, expose us to a constant barrage of environmental stimuli, such as the flash of a car’s headlights at a crosswalk or the train’s public address system announcing an incident. This ability of our brain to react to the unexpected is known as involuntary attention. It is an automatic mechanism that allows us to adapt flexibly to the demands of a dynamic environment, but to what extent does this sudden external stimulation alter the information temporarily held in memory?
Persistence or flexibility: the role of external disruptions in the involuntary retrieval of information temporarily stored in memory.
In a recent study published in the journal Acta Psychologica and conducted at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research (CIMCYC) by Águeda Fuentes-Guerra Toral, Fabiano Botta, Juan Lupiáñez, Carlos González-García, and Elisa Martín-Arévalo, it was discovered that these abrupt external stimuli do much more than simply capture our gaze. The study reveals that they have the power to prioritize and select the information we are temporarily holding in our working memory—where we store and manipulate information to guide our future behaviors—influencing how we retrieve short-term memories.
To understand this process, the team used an experimental paradigm known as retro-cueing. In this design, participants were asked to hold a series of objects in their memory to perform a subsequent task. While they were doing so, flashes appeared randomly at one of the locations where the objects to be memorized had previously been presented (involuntary attention). The goal was to observe whether these external cues not only drew attention to a point in physical space but also “illuminated” or activated the memory content linked to that space. The results confirmed that the objects highlighted by the flash were recalled more quickly.
The most fascinating aspect of this study is how we adapt depending on the context—a variable that the research team refers to as “metacontrol states”. These states refer to the mental strategies people adopt to tackle tasks. The experiment demonstrated that we do not always react the same way to external stimuli. When the environment is stable and predictable (blocks with no intervening events between the objects to be memorized and the flash), the brain tends toward a state of “persistence.” In this mode, we are extremely efficient, and the system is configured for cognitive “exploitation”: external stimuli (the flash) facilitate a much faster response, allowing us to quickly process the information we already have in mind.
However, when the environment becomes uncertain due to the emergence of novelty or disruptive events, the brain automatically shifts into a “flexible” state. In this “exploration” mode, the automatic speed we observe in the persistent state is reduced or disappears. Faced with surprise, the brain decides to “hit the brakes” and prioritize analyzing the new environmental situation, balancing what we remember with what is happening outside. This shift in strategy is essential to prevent us from getting stuck on a task when the outside world requires an urgent or different response.
This finding suggests that our working memory is not a static storehouse, but a dynamic system modulated by uncertainty. Understanding how the balance between being persistent (efficient) or flexible (exploratory) directs our attention toward content in memory allows us to advance our understanding of how to optimize our cognitive performance in a world full of interruptions.
Reference
Fuentes-Guerra, Á., Botta, F., Lupiáñez, J., González-García, C., & Martín-Arévalo, E. (2025). Exogenous attention and its relationship with working memory contents: beyond spatial selection. Acta Psychologica, 256, 105003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105003
Contact
Agueda Fuentes Guerra - aguedafgt@ugr.es