Learning how to exploit sources of information

Abstract

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.

Relevance-based processing: Little role for task-relevant expectations

“…Specifically, it would suggest that dimensional selection, when it occurs, does select out of consciousness (as it is, presumably, possible only when the to-be-selected dimension can be phenomenally differentiated-i.e., consciously perceived as separate-from the irrelevant ones). This state of affairs is different from the previously demonstrated irrelevance-induced blindness (Eitam et al, 2013;Eitam et al, 2015) or the related phenomenon of attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015;Wyble et al, 2018). The latter is argued to stem from rapid forgetting, and the former is thought to be based on so-called Posnerian selection (feature, object, or space based), and for which dimensional separability is irrelevant.…”

“…Importantly, various pieces of evidence suggest that a forgetting-based explanation is not adequate for irrelevancebased blindness (Eitam et al, 2015;Eitam et al, 2013). First, if forgetting was a key factor, one would expect to find an order effect such that reporting the irrelevant stimulus would be worse when probed second (after reporting the relevant stimulus) compared with when it is probed first; yet no such effect was found (Eitam et al, 2013;Wyble et al, 2018; see Experiment 2 of the current study). Second, a recent study (Wyble et al, 2018) found that with the attribute amnesia paradigm, increasing the number of relevant-probed trials before asking about the irrelevant feature was associated with significantly longer response times (RT) to the irrelevant probes (from 15.2 seconds after one trial to 24 seconds after 49 trials).…”

“…In contrast, that same study (Wyble et al, 2018) also found that with the irrelevance-induced blindness paradigm, RT was substantially shorter and did not vary significantly with the number of relevant trials (4.2 seconds after one trial, 5.4 seconds after 49 trials). This suggested that participants had no reportable trace due to effective filtering, and hence never initiated a search (Wyble et al, 2018). Thus, it seems that a selection-based explanation is more appropriate for pure irrelevance-induced blindness.…”

“…This alternative is supported by the fact that participants' performance on the color dimension in Experiment 2 was also poor for the relevant object (cf. Chen & Wyble, 2015;Wyble et al, 2018). Although this possibility has never been fully explored in the context of cognitive blindness, there is a large body of experimental and theoretical work supporting the possibility of the filtering out of a dimension (e.g., Garner, 1970).…”

“…For instance, Chen and Wyble's (2015) task involved a brief (150 ms), simultaneous presentation of four small peripheral stimuli that were then masked, whereas Eitam et al's task involved a central presentation of two larger stimuli for 500 ms without a mask. Notwithstanding these substantial differences, a recent collaboration (Wyble, Hess, O'Donnell, Chen, & Eitam, 2018) has seemingly shown that both phenomena are sensitive to a Bsetting-in^of task expectations. Specifically, irrelevance-induced blindness increased to 63% when, instead of a single-trial, the surprise question about the irrelevant information arrived after 49 trials in which only the relevant information was probed (i.e., 49 Breportrelevant trials^).…”