Larger IOR effects following forget than following remember instructions depend on exogenous attentional withdrawal and target localization

Abstract

When words are onset in the visual periphery, inhibition of return (IOR) for a subsequent target is larger when those words receive an intervening forget instruction than when they receive a remember instruction Taylor (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A, 613-629, 2005). The present study manipulated the allocation of endogenous and exogenous attention to assess the source of the forget > remember IOR difference. We determined that the forget > remember IOR difference likely arises from the differential withdrawal of exogenous-rather than endogenous-attention. Furthermore, this forget > remember IOR difference occurs only when a spatially compatible localization response is required; it does not occur when a simple detection response or a perceptual discrimination is required. This suggests that the forget > remember difference in the magnitude of IOR is not due to differences in perceptual/ attentional processing. Instead, an instruction to remember or forget biases spatial responses in accordance with whether a location has previously contained relevant or irrelevant information. We suggest that directed forgetting in an itemmethod paradigm is not accomplished by changes in attention; rather, the changes in attention are coincident with changes in memory and may serve to bias later responses away from a source of unreliable information.

Selection for encoding: No evidence of greater attentional capture following forget than remember instructions

“…Notably, the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect was quite large, even when compared to other dual-task paradigms that measured recognition memory following a combined target task and unemotional word encoding task: our directed forgetting effect was 0.39, which is at the high end of our similar published studies, which vary from~0.12-0.40 (e.g., Fawcett & Taylor, 2008, 2012Taylor, 2005;Taylor & Fawcett, 2011;Thompson et al, 2014). An informal evaluation suggests that this was due to especially effective implementation of the forget instruction in the current experiment: our obtained hit rate of 0.61 for remember items was consistent with other studies from our laboratory (rangẽ 0.46−0.74), whereas our obtained hit rate of 0.22 for forget items was smaller than and outside of our typical range (rangẽ 0.31−0.54).…”

“…An instruction to intentionally forget initiates a cognitively effortful (Cheng et al, 2012;Fawcett & Taylor, 2008;Fawcett et al, 2013a;Lee & Hsu, 2013) attempt to prohibit further unwanted rehearsal (Hourihan & Taylor, 2006), through a withdrawal of attentional resources (Fawcett & Taylor, 2010;Fawcett & Taylor, 2012;Taylor, 2005;Taylor & Fawcett, 2011) from the representation of the unwanted item -including its location (Hourihan et al, 2007). In this way, forget items receive less elaboration than remember items and are therefore later remembered with a lower probability and with poorer fidelity (Fawcett et al, submitted), thus accounting for the observed directed forgetting effect in recognition memory.…”

“…We would argue that the shorter interval between the word and target on the study trials (needed to measure exogenous orienting) likely made the current experiment more difficult for our participants than otherwise similar dual-task paradigms that presented a longer interval. Indeed, when we examined remember and forget trial performance as a function of word-target interval across similar dual-task studies (e.g., Fawcett & Taylor, 2008, 2012Taylor, 2005;Taylor & Fawcett, 2011;Thompson et al, 2014), we obtained an R 2 = 0.02 for remember items and R 2 = 0.47 for forget items (neither of which was attributable to outliers).…”

“…Indeed, if a forget instruction had weakened spatial code activation by the cue onset (e.g., Taylor & Fawcett, 2011), this would have been evident in subsequent target RTs any time a localization response was required, such as used in Experiment 1 (for which there was evidence of smaller cueing effects following forget instructions than remember instructions) and in Experiment 2 (for which there was a numerical pattern but no support for smaller cueing effects following forget instructions than remember instructions).…”

“…We elected to test the capture of exogenous attention -rather than endogenous attention -because the latter requires top-down processing that is likely to interact with the top-down processing required to instantiate the memory instructions. Moreover, it is specifically exogenous attention rather than endogenous attention that is differentially withdrawn from forget words and remember words (Taylor & Fawcett, 2011).…”