Last, the greater the RIFT responses to the target compared to the distractor, the faster the participant responded to the target, demonstrating that the RIFT responses capture behaviorally relevant processes.

2) The presence of a distractor attenuated the initial RIFT response to the target, reflecting competition during the initial stages of visual processing

For conditional comparisons of the RIFT responses, we found that 1)Both target and distractor evoked stronger initial RIFT responses than nontargets, reflecting top-down and bottom-up attentional effects on early visual processing. And RIFT responses to the distractor eventually be suppressed.

For tagging manipulation, we tagged target and distractor in distractor present condition, tagged target and one of the nontarget in distractor absent condition. And frequency-tagging manipulation successfully elicited corresponding frequency-specific neural responses

We found that the salient distractor captured attention on behavioral level

In the end, we found no evidence that the influence of non-prioritized memory items on early visual processing differs between the three experimental paradigms. And we found non-prioritized memory items influence early visual processing when we combined the data from three experiments.

In Experiment 3, we also found that only prioritized memory items influenced early visual processing in terms of the allocation of spatial attention.

However, in Experiment 2, we we found that only memory items in a prioritized state influenced early visual processing, as measured through the allocation of spatial attention.

In Experiment 1, we found that both prioritized memory items and non-prioritized memory items can impact early visual processing, as through reports of conscious access, with prioritized memory items influencing early visual processing more strongly than non-prioritized memory items.