Attention is guided by memory, learning and flexible templates, review argues

A new review in Nature Reviews Psychology argues that the dominant model of visual attention is due for an overhaul. Nancy B. Carlisle and Geoffrey F. Woodman synthesize evidence that contradicts the field’s modal theoretical view, in which people hold a veridical representation of a desired target in working memory and use that template to guide attention towards matching objects. According to the authors, the current state of the field instead points to attentional guidance that is flexible, adaptive on the basis of experience, and driven by a coordination of multiple internal mechanisms, including working memory, long-term memory, statistical learning and selection history.

The review opens from an everyday scenario: searching for a pen on a cluttered desk. In laboratory visual search tasks, top-down control is thought to bias attention towards goal-related target objects. The classical account holds that a faithful copy of the target is maintained in working memory as the attentional template. Carlisle and Woodman organize their challenge to this account around several bodies of evidence. First, they present findings that top-down control is frequently driven by long-term memory rather than working memory, meaning that stored knowledge accumulated over repeated experiences can direct the search for goal-related items.

Second, the authors discuss evidence that guidance can be shifted away from a veridical target representation when doing so makes search more efficient. In other words, the internal template that steers attention need not be an exact copy of the target; the system appears to adopt representations that serve the broader goal of finding items quickly, even if those representations diverge from the target as literally defined. Third, the review covers evidence that attention can be guided away from distractors, in addition to being guided towards targets.

Finally, the authors examine the role of prior experience in attentional guidance, drawing on work on statistical learning and selection history, which describe how repeated exposure to the statistical structure of the environment and a person’s history of attending to particular items shape future deployment of attention. The review is illustrated with figures depicting common search tasks, real-world search while driving, and an updated view of attentional search that incorporates these multiple influences. The authors conclude that no single-representation model can account for the full pattern of findings, and that theoretical models of visual search need to incorporate the multiple factors that guide attention. As a Review article, the piece synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than reporting new experiments, and the full analysis is available behind the journal’s subscription access options.

Subject of Research: How long-term memory, flexible attentional templates and prior learning guide visual attention

Article Title: The role of long-term memory, flexible templates and learning in attentional guidance

Article References: Carlisle, N. B., & Woodman, G. F. (2026). The role of long-term memory, flexible templates and learning in attentional guidance. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00626-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44159-026-00626-2

Keywords: visual search, attentional guidance, working memory, long-term memory, attentional template, statistical learning, selection history, distractor suppression, top-down control, Nature Reviews Psychology, role, long-term