Hyung-Bum Park¹, Monica Rosenberg², Edward Vogel²; ¹Washington University School of Medicine, ²University of Chicago

Attentional lapses are often interpreted as uniform failures of control, yet emerging accounts propose that they reflect competition among concurrently active goals. If lapses signal goal competition, they should prospectively predict voluntary task switches, and this relationship may depend on individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity. We tested this idea using a modified continuous performance task with bilateral face and scene stimuli. Participants freely chose whether to perform the face or scene task after each block, with the constraint that all 25 blocks of each task type had to be completed. Lapses in block n predicted the task chosen on block n+1, and this prospective link depended strongly on WM capacity. Individuals with lower WM capacity were more likely to switch after lapse-prone blocks, whereas individuals with higher WM capacity tended to switch after successful blocks. Eye-tracking revealed matching patterns, with low-capacity participants directing early saccades toward the irrelevant distractor before switches and high-capacity participants showing the opposite tendency. Pupil dilation was elevated early in pre-switch blocks for low-capacity participants, consistent with heightened internal competition. In a forced-choice control session, externally imposed task sequences selectively reduced lapse rates for low-capacity individuals while leaving high-capacity performance unchanged. These findings indicate that lapses do not uniformly reflect disengagement or a single type of control failure. Instead, the relationship between lapses and voluntary switching depends on WM capacity, and is consistent with a goal-competition framework in which lapses mark dynamic shifts in the balance between competing goals.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) N00014-22–1-2123 to E.K.V. and M.D.R.