Long-term effects of cognitive conflict on performance are not as well understood as immediate effects. We used a change detection task to explore long-term consequences of cognitive conflict by manipulating the congruity between a changing object and a background scene. According to conflict-based accounts of memory formation, incongruent trials (e.g., a cow on the street), in spite of hindering immediate performance, should promote stronger encoding than congruent trials (e.g., a cow on a prairie). Surprisingly, across three experiments we show that semantic incongruity actually impairs remembering of the information presented during scene processing. This set of results is incompatible with the frequently accepted hypothesis of conflict-triggered learning. Rather, we discuss the present data and other studies previously reported in the literature in the light of two much older hypotheses of memory formation: the desirable difficulty and the levels of processing principles.

No abstract

Past research has shown that change detection performance is often more efficient for target objects that are semantically incongruent with a surrounding scene context than for target objects that are semantically congruent with the scene context. One account of these findings is that attention is attracted to objects for which the identity of the object conflicts with the meaning of the scene, perhaps as a violation of expectancies created by earlier recruitment of scene gist information. An alternative account of the performance benefit for incongruent objects is that attention is more apt to linger on incongruent objects, as perhaps identifying these objects is more difficult due to conflicting information from the scene context. In the current experiment, we present natural scenes in a change detection task while monitoring eye movements. We find that eye gaze is attracted to these objects relatively early during scene processing. ARTICLE HISTORY

Attributing a negative achievement outcome (e.g., failing a test) to causes that are personally uncontrollable and stable elicits a low expectancy of future success, feelings of hopelessness in that domain, and reduced behavioral efforts to succeed. Thus, a tendency to make such attributions (i.e., dysfunctional academic attributional style) is an individual differences variable that puts people at risk. Two studies examine the factor structure and predictive validity of the Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire (AASQ). Study 1 (using two independent samples) found that the AASQ is a factorially valid measure of functional and dysfunctional attributional styles. In Study 2, during repeated failure in an academic task, the success expectancies, hopefulness, and behavioral persistence of students with a dysfunctional attributional style were lower than those of students with a functional attributional style. These findings modify the attributional theory of achievement motivation (Weiner, 1985) by positing an individual differences moderator variable (i.e., attributional style) and extend attributional research on at-risk students.

Researchers have suggested that the recognition memory effects resulting from two separate attentional manipulations—attentional boost and perceptual degradation—may share a common cause; namely a transient up-regulation of attention at the time of encoding that leads to enhanced memory performance at the time of retrieval. Prior research has demonstrated that inducing two similar transient shifts of attention simultaneously produces redundant performance in memory. In the present study, we sought to evaluate the combined influence of the attentional boost and perceptual degradation on recognition memory. If these two effects share a common cause, then we ought to observe a redundancy in memory performance, such that these two factors interact. Yet, across four experiments we fail to observe such a redundancy in recognition memory. We evaluate these results using the limited resource model of attention and speculate on how combining transient shifts of attention may produce redundant memory performance in the one case, but non-redundant performance in the other case.