When a unexpected event, such as a car honking, occurs in daily life, it often disrupts our train of thought. In the lab, this effect was recently modeled with a task in which verbal working memory (WM) was disrupted by unexpected auditory events (Wessel et al., 2016). Here, we tested whether this effect extends to a different type of WM, viz. visuomotor. We found that unexpected auditory events similarly decremented visuomotor WM. Moreover, this effect persisted for many more trials than previously shown, and the effect occurred for two types of unexpected auditory event. Furthermore, we found that unexpected events decremented WM by decreasing the quantity, but not necessarily the quality, of the items stored. These studies show a statistically robust, and across time enduring, impact of unexpected events on visuomotor WM. They also show an increase of guessing, consistent with a neuroscience-inspired theory that unexpected events ‘wipe out’ WM by stopping the ongoing maintenance of the trace.
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