Attention, voluntary saccade, or long-term fixation: None of them confirms visual working memory consolidation.

The present study investigates whether voluntary saccades or fixations on an item ensure its visual working memory consolidation through three experiments, which used modified attribute amnesia paradigms. In each trial, all the items were first masked, and participants needed to gaze at the masked locations to temporarily unmask the items below. They were asked to search for the target and report its location in presurprise trials and then were unexpectedly asked to report its identity in a surprise trial and two control trials. In Experiments 3 and 4, the participants were further asked to retain information for a brief while before reporting colors or identities. Report accuracy in the surprise trial was significantly lower than in control trials across four experiments, indicating that an attribute amnesia phenomenon was found. All these results demonstrate that neither voluntary saccades toward an item nor fixations on it are a sufficient condition of automatic visual working memory consolidation of it, indicating the separation between the mechanisms of foveal attention and visual working memory consolidation.