Ryan Miller¹ (ryanm@mun.ca), Blaire Dube¹; ¹Memorial University of Newfoundland

Representations in visual working memory (VWM) are susceptible to distortion from perceptual distractors. When a distractor shares a feature dimension with an item in VWM, the distortion is systematic: the remembered feature shifts toward the feature of the distractor. This attractive bias is often attributed to direct interference with the VWM representation at the moment the distractor is processed, but it has recently been suggested that the bias may instead reflect a lingering distractor trace available at the time of report. Notably, most experiments demonstrating attractive bias probe memory after a moderate, fixed post-distractor delay (typically ~1000-1500ms), leaving the temporal dynamics of the effect underexamined. Here, we tested whether the strength of the distractor trace impacts the magnitude of attractive bias by manipulating this post-distractor delay. Participants encoded the orientation of a randomly rotated bar. After a fixed initial memory delay, a to-be-ignored distractor bar appeared, rotated +/- 15 degrees relative to the target. The subsequent post-distractor delay was either 500ms, 1500ms, or 3000ms (randomly intermixed) before participants reported the orientation of the memory target. If attractive bias is driven by a lingering distractor trace at report, the longest delay should yield the weakest bias. While we observed robust attractive bias across all delay conditions, there was no effect of post-distractor delay. These results suggest that attractive bias stabilizes by at least 500ms post-distractor and is not meaningfully influenced by residual distractor trace strength beyond this early period.