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

Chen, Hui; Yu, Jiahan; Fu, Yingtao; Zhu, Ping; Li, Wei; Zhou, Jifan; Shen, Mowei

doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00923-7

Cited by 27 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 55 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similarly, future research should scrutinize the phenomenon in which observers report that fully visible items did not appear even though VWM was not full (e.g., Chen et al, 2019). This seems to be an intriguing and unexpected effect as one would expect that four real-world, visually distinct objects should be easily remembered.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual working memory (VWM) has been extensively studied in the context of memory capacity. However, less research has been devoted to the metacognitive processes involved in VWM. Most metacognitive studies of VWM studies tested simple, impoverished stimuli, whereas outside of the laboratory setting, we typically interact with meaningful, complex objects. Thus, the present study aimed to explore the extent to which people are able to monitor VWM of real-world objects that are more ecologically valid and further afford less inter-trial interference. Specifically, in three experiments, participants viewed a set of either four or six memory items, consisting of images of unique real-world objects that were not repeated throughout the experiment. Following the memory array, participants were asked to indicate where the probe item appeared (Experiment 1) whether it appeared at all (Experiment 2) or whether it appeared and what was its temporal order (Experiment 3). VWM monitoring was assessed by subjective confidence judgments regarding participants' objective performance. Similar to common metacognitive findings in other domains, we found that subjective judgments overestimated performance and underestimated errors, even for real-world, complex items held in VWM. These biases seem not to be task-specific as they were found in temporal, spatial, and identity VWM tasks. Yet, the results further showed that meaningful, real-world objects were better remembered than distorted items, and this memory advantage also translated to metacognitive measures.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The current findings also have crucial implications in better understanding the underlying mechanism of the recently discovered phenomenon of attribute amnesia 34,[63][64][65] . In a typical attribute amnesia experiment, participants were asked to report the location of the target item from a search set of four items (e.g., a target letter among distractor numbers).…”

Section: Attention and Forgettingmentioning

confidence: 67%

More attention with less working memory: The active inhibition of attended but outdated information

Fu¹,

Zhou²,

Zhou³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is commonly believed that attending to a piece of information would facilitate its subsequent memory. However, it remains unknown whether this consensus must always be true in all cases. Here, we provided a series of demonstrations supporting the striking possibility that attention could sometimes lead to memory weakening. This possibility was tested by directly comparing the memory traces of key features that were initially task-relevant but became outdated once used with baseline irrelevant features that were completely irrelevant throughout the task. Experiments 1–3 consistently showed that the memory traces of fully attended key features were weaker than the ignored irrelevant features, indicating that attention facilitated forgetting of key features. Experiment 4 demonstrated that forgetting of key features was an active process subject to execute control. These findings shed new light on the understanding of the relationship between attention and forgetting.

show abstract

“…Experiment 2 was designed to test whether the finding of Experiment 1 could be generalized when adopting more complex and meaningful stimuli (i.e., Chinese characters). It could be possible that attribute amnesia would be eliminated or reduced when using complex, meaningful stimuli, as many previous studies showed that participants exhibited an advantage for processing and/or remembering these stimuli (e.g., Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008;Chen, Yu, et al, 2019;Potter, Nieuwenstein, & Strohminger, 2008). Liu, Shu, & Li, 2007).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The no-overflow view claimed that information outside attentional focus cannot be consciously perceived or reported (e.g., CB and IB) while overflow view argues that even the unattended information could sometimes be phenomenally experienced and reportable (e.g., cuing method in Sperling's task). Unlike the abovementioned debate focusing on unattended information, the current study sought to further address the debate from a new perspective, through directly testing whether fully attended supraliminal information is necessarily reportable by adopting a variation of the recently developed paradigm of attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015Chen, Yan, et al, 2019;Chen, Yu, et al, 2019). Despite it has been explicitly or implicitly assumed that fully attended information would be consciously perceived and reportable (De Brigard & Prinz, 2010;Marchetti, 2012), it remains unknown whether this assumption must be true.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consciousness can overflow report: Novel evidence from attribute amnesia of a single stimulus

Wang

Luo

et al. 2021

Consciousness and Cognition

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Subjective report has been used as a measurement of consciousness. However, we usually experience seeing much more than what can be reported. This relates to a longstanding controversy regarding the nature of visual consciousness; that is, whether it is confined to cognitive access and can be directly measured by reportability, or whether it is rich and overflows report. Most debate previously concentrated on the unattended information, but acquiesced that information under attentional focus would reach consciousness and be reportable. This study sought to further address the debate from a new perspective, through directly testing whether fully attended supraliminal information is necessarily reportable with a variant of attribute amnesia. Participants were asked to judge the parity of a single number (Experiments 1 & 3) or whether a Chinese character referred to furniture (Experiments 2 & 4). After several trials, they were unexpectedly asked to report the target identity. The results consistently showed that participants could not correctly report the target identity, indicating that fully attended information that was consciously perceived could sometimes overflow report. These findings not only provide novel evidence for the overflow argument, but also have crucial implications in the relationship between consciousness and working memory.

show abstract

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

Cited by 27 publications

References 55 publications

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

A Metacognitive Perspective of Visual Working Memory With Rich Complex Objects

More attention with less working memory: The active inhibition of attended but outdated information

Consciousness can overflow report: Novel evidence from attribute amnesia of a single stimulus

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About