Attribute amnesia can be modulated by foveal presentation and the pre-allocation of endogenous spatial attention

Attribute amnesia (AA) is a phenomenon in which participants have difficulty answering an unexpected question about an attended attribute of the most recent target stimulus. A similar situation can occur in cases of real-life eyewitness identification when the eyewitness did not explicitly try to remember the alleged perpetrator's face despite having attended to it. We found that AA is generalizable to novel faces, such that when participants were unexpectedly asked to identify a face, performance was poor, even though they had just attended to that face seconds ago (N = 40 each in an initial experiment and its replication). This finding shows that unexpected face identification is inaccurate even when the face had just been attended to and suffered minimal decay and interference, implying that AA can explain some cases of failure of eyewitness identification that cannot be attributed to a lack of attention or post-event interference.

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“…AA has been replicated and extended in multiple studies (e.g., Born et al, 2020;H. Chen & Wyble, 2015bW.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

And like that, they were gone: A failure to remember recently attended unique faces

et al. 2021

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“…The AA effect has been repeatedly verified in a subsequent series of studies (Born et al, 2020;Born et al, 2019;Chen & Wyble, 2015bChen et al, 2019;Chen & Howe, 2017;Jiang et al, 2016). Furthermore, Chen and Wyble (2016) demonstrated that AA was not driven by forgetting or interferences caused by the surprise tests, but rather occurred due to a lack of consolidating fragilely encoded information into working memory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Using the attribute amnesia paradigm to test the automatic memory advantage of person names

Liu

Huang

et al. 2021

Psychon Bull Rev

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Person names, which hold within them extensive meaning, such as gender and cultural information, play an essential role in our social interaction. The intentional memory advantage of person names has been proved, but whether the automatic memory advantage of them exists remains unclear. In order to explore this question, we used a paradigm called attribute amnesia that allows us to test the automatic memory of person names in a working memory task. In Experiment 1, we adopted a classic attribute amnesia paradigm including 11 pre-surprise trials requiring participants to report the location of the target (person names or animal names) among three distractors and one surprise trial requiring them to unexpectedly report the identity of the target. The results showed that the identity report accuracy of person names in the surprise test was significantly better than that of animal names that served as a control group. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but increased the number of pre-surprise trials that could reduce the report accuracy of surprise test according to previous studies. The results revealed that the accuracy of the surprise test of person names decreased significantly, and showed no significant difference from that of animal names. These results suggest that there exists an automatic memory advantage of person names in working memory; however, such an automatic memory advantage effect could be reduced after participants learn to stop automatically encoding the attended but no-need-to-report person names through experiencing sufficient trials.

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“…However, effects of the additional memory task in Experiment 2B reflect a conscious task requirement, so that we think it is more appropriate to consider the results in relation to WM and not priming. On the other hand, it is clear that participants easily forget features (Chen & Wyble, 2015) even when presented in the fovea (Born et al, 2020), which may suggest a link to the priming literature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional guidance by irrelevant features depends on their successful encoding into working memory.

Kerzel¹,

Cong²

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Attentional selection is guided by templates of the target in working memory. It has been proposed that attentional templates integrate target features (e.g., purple chair) to guide attention in an object-based fashion. Alternatively, it may be that attentional templates are established for each target feature individually (e.g., purple and chair). To provide support for the latter account, we used a task where participants memorized a target shape while ignoring an irrelevant color. In the combined condition, the shape was shown in the irrelevant color. In the separate condition, the irrelevant color was spatially separate from the shape. After the initial presentation and a blank retention interval, participants were asked to make a saccade to the initially viewed shape, which was shown together with a distractor. Attentional guidance by the irrelevant color was strongly reduced with separate presentation, suggesting that guidance is object-based. However, it may be that irrelevant color was less reliably encoded with separate presentation. Therefore, we asked participants to store the irrelevant color for later recall. With the additional memory task, guidance by irrelevant color occurred regardless of whether it was presented as part of an object or separately. Thus, effects of irrelevant features are easier to observe with combined presentation because all features of an object are automatically encoded into working memory, where they form integrated feature templates. Nonetheless, guidance by separate features is possible, but the poor encoding of irrelevant features with separate presentation makes it more difficult to observe. Public Significance StatementThis study shows that any irrelevant feature stored in visual working memory can interfere with attentional selection of the target object. Interference is not limited to situations where the irrelevant feature is part of the target object.

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Attribute amnesia can be modulated by foveal presentation and the pre-allocation of endogenous spatial attention

Cited by 10 publications

References 35 publications

And like that, they were gone: A failure to remember recently attended unique faces

And like that, they were gone: A failure to remember recently attended unique faces

Using the attribute amnesia paradigm to test the automatic memory advantage of person names

Attentional guidance by irrelevant features depends on their successful encoding into working memory.

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