Attribute amnesia is greatly reduced with novel stimuli

Chen, Weijia; Howe, Piers D. L.

doi:10.7717/peerj.4016

Cited by 14 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…This finding discredits the possibility that accumulated interference is primarily responsible for the monotonic decrease in the ability to report on the identity of the letters. Note that these results are in contrast to the findings of Chen & Howe (2017) who presented a modified version of this paradigm that uses small images of objects as stimuli and asks participants to report the location of the animal. They found that when the image was novel on each trial, participants could accurately remember the target on a surprise trial, even though the surprise trial was preceded by 155 locationquestion trials.…”

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…If participants were categorizing letters without processing their individual identity (such as 'letter' vs 'digit'), then there is no reason that switching the set of target letters would alter performance. It is noteworthy, however, to mention that Chen & Howe (2017) found that using a novel target image on each trial largely eliminated the attribute amnesia effect, which suggests that the identity of the stimulus is determined during the process of finding the target. However, since the targets were novel on each trial, it may have been hard to adopt a strategy that allowed categorization without identification.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Information Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Learning how to exploit sources of information

Wyble¹,

Heß²,

O'Donnell³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e. unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which control processes specialize the conversion of available information into memory representations. We hypothesize that such control is refined by repeated experience with a task, and as a result, memory representations will specialize as task experience accrues, such that report accuracy for an unexpected question will progressively worsen as the number of preceding trials increases. To test this, subjects were asked to report the location of a letter among three digits. The ability to respond correctly to a surprise question about the identity of that letter became worse as the experiment progressed. A followup study evaluated whether this incremental worsening of report accuracy could be explained as a buildup of proactive interference by varying the set of letters for the surprise test. The results were unchanged relative to the original experiment, which argues against a primary contribution of proactive interference in the worsening performance. The effect was replicated in a similar paradigm using color disks. These findings illustrate that repeated performance of a prescriptive task engages an adaptive modification of control processes that focus information processing on specific attributes of a stimulus that are expected to be necessary in the future, regardless of their immediate task relevance.

show abstract

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: Mechanisms Of Information Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Learning how to exploit sources of information

Wyble¹,

Heß²,

O'Donnell³

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Bdigit^), then there is no reason that switching the set of target letters would alter performance. It is noteworthy, however, to mention that W. Chen and Howe (2017) found that using a novel target image on each trial largely eliminated the attribute amnesia effect, which suggests that the identity of the stimulus is determined during the process of finding the target. However, since the targets were novel on each trial, it may have been hard to adopt a strategy that allowed categorization without identification.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Information Exploitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning how to exploit sources of information

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e., unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which control processes specialize the conversion of available information into memory representations. We hypothesize that such control is refined by repeated experience with a task, and as a result, memory representations will specialize as task experience accrues, such that report accuracy for an unexpected question will progressively worsen as the number of preceding trials increases. To test this, subjects were asked to report the location of a letter among three digits. The ability to respond correctly to a surprise question about the identity of that letter became worse as the experiment progressed. A follow-up study evaluated whether this incremental worsening of report accuracy could be explained as a buildup of proactive interference by varying the set of letters for the surprise test. The results were unchanged relative to the original experiment, which argues against a primary contribution of proactive interference in the worsening performance. The effect was replicated in a similar paradigm using color disks. These findings illustrate that repeated performance of a prescriptive task engages an adaptive modification of control processes that focus information processing on specific attributes of a stimulus that are expected to be necessary in the future, regardless of their immediate task relevance.

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“…Brady et al (2016) reported working memory capacity advantage for natural objects relative to simple stimuli. More importantly, two previous AA studies Chen & Howe, 2017) provided stronger and more direct evidence implying that the AA effect might differ when using complex, meaningful stimuli as compared with using simple stimuli. Chen and Howe (2017) adopted animal pictures as target stimuli and found that AA almost disappeared when the target stimuli of animal pictures were not repeated in the whole experiment (Experiments 3 and 4 in Chen & Howe, 2017).…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…More importantly, two previous AA studies Chen & Howe, 2017) provided stronger and more direct evidence implying that the AA effect might differ when using complex, meaningful stimuli as compared with using simple stimuli. Chen and Howe (2017) adopted animal pictures as target stimuli and found that AA almost disappeared when the target stimuli of animal pictures were not repeated in the whole experiment (Experiments 3 and 4 in Chen & Howe, 2017). In contrast, H. Chen and Wyble (2016, Experiment 2) employed colored letters as target stimuli and observed that AA persisted even when the target stimuli were never repeated through the experiment.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

Does attribute amnesia occur with the presentation of complex, meaningful stimuli? The answer is, “it depends”

Chen

et al. 2019

Mem Cogn

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Attribute amnesia (AA) is a recently reported phenomenon whereby participants are unable to report a salient attribute of a stimulus (e.g., the color or identity of a target letter) on which their attention has just been focused during a prior task. This counterintuitive effect has been repeatedly replicated with various simple stimuli such as digits and letters. The current study sought to explore boundaries of AA by investigating whether the phenomenon persists when participants encounter complex, meaningful stimuli (e.g., pictures) that have been shown to hold an advantage in cognitive processing and memory. In Experiments 1a-d, we examined whether AA was observed with different types of complex stimuli. In Experiments 2a-b and 3a-b, we linked the type of stimuli (simple vs. complex and meaningful stimuli) to the other two potential boundary factors of AA (i.e., repetitiveness of target stimulus and set effects of Einstellung) to see whether there were interactions between stimuli type and these two boundary factors. The results demonstrated that the AA effect was still consistently observed for complex stimuli in a typical AA paradigm wherein participants encountered many trials and the targets were repeated across trials. However, this effect only appeared for simple stimuli, but not for complex stimuli in two special cases: when target stimuli were never repeated through the experiment, or when the surprise test was placed on the first trial of the experiment. These findings have crucial implications in understanding the boundaries of the AA phenomenon.

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Attribute amnesia is greatly reduced with novel stimuli

Cited by 14 publications

References 31 publications

Learning how to exploit sources of information

Learning how to exploit sources of information

Learning how to exploit sources of information

Does attribute amnesia occur with the presentation of complex, meaningful stimuli? The answer is, “it depends”

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