Manmade and real-world items in visual working memory differentially regulate priority for accessing visual consciousness.

Recent studies have found that the items retained in visual working memory (VWM) regulate the time required to access visual consciousness. However, this finding obtained from manmade stimuli may not applicable to real-world objects, as objects in real life are typically connected meaningfully. We used breaking continuous flash suppression ( b-CFS) and intermixed a delayed match-to-sample task to determine whether manmade and real-world representations in VWM differentially regulate priority for accessing visual consciousness, to determine whether VWM retains manmade and real-world objects at different representational levels. The results found that when the stimulus was congruent with manmade items in VWM, the stimulus was detected faster than the memory-incongruent stimulus, whereas the memory-incongruent stimulus was detected faster than the memory-congruent stimulus for the real-world objects. These findings suggest that VWM regulates conscious perception at the feature level for manmade stimuli and at the object-identity level for real-world stimuli, highlighting the hierarchical nature of representational processing in conscious access.