When a target and a distractor that share the same response dimension appear in rapid succession, participants often erroneously report the distractor instead of the target. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, we examined whether these intrusion errors occur because the target is often not encoded in working memory (WM) or are generated at later post-encoding stages. In four experiments, participants either provided two guesses about the target’s identity, or had to select the target among items that did not include the potential intruder. Results showed that the target did not gain access to WM on a substantial number of trials where the distractor was encoded. This was also confirmed with an electrophysiological marker of WM storage (CDA component). These findings are inconsistent with post-encoding accounts of distractor intrusions, which postulate that competitive interactions within WM impair awareness of the target, the precision of target representations, or result in the target being dropped from WM. They show instead that target-distractor competition already operates at earlier perceptual stages, and reduces the likelihood that the target gains access to WM. We provide a theoretical framework to explain these findings and how they challenge contemporary models of temporal attention
