Pay attention and you might miss it: Greater learning during attentional lapses

Abstract

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful-a benefit that prior research focusing only on goalrelevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.

Independent and interactive dynamics between statistical learning and inhibitory control

“…However, integrated processing is a characteristic of the correlated flanker task where probabilistic relations appear between flankers and targets. In studies using the correlated flanker task, it was found that responses were faster for consistent flanker-target pairings than for inconsistent pairings, suggesting the incidental learning of contingencies between flankers and targets (72)(73)(74)(75). Contrary to these studies, in the present experiment, there was a conflict between flankers and targets and targets followed learnable statistical regularities across multiple trials.…”

Memory’s pulse: episodic memory formation is theta-rhythmic

“…Regardless of the cause, the dissociations we observe between attentional and mnemonic rhythms paints a more complex picture of attention-memory interactions than have been previously considered 38 . On a trial-by-trial basis we confirmed that people were better at forming memories when in a good attentional state 41,42,47 . Yet, on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, the best moments for memory formation were not those when participants were best able to process the images.…”

“…(2) participants' regular use of nicotine, a potent ACh agonist. To test the first relation, we used established methods [40][41][42] to label each encoding trial as reflecting a good ("in the zone") state when it was preceded by a period of low RT deviance and a bad ("out of the zone") state when preceded by highly deviant RTs (Fig. 4a; see Methods: Sustained attention and memory rhythms).…”

Fluctuations in Sustained Attention Explain Moment-to-Moment Shifts in Children’s Memory Formation

“…Here, we ask why children form high-quality memories only in select moments by exploring the role of a separate aspect of cognition: sustained attention (Decker & Duncan, 2020; Honey et al, 2017). In adults, attention fluctuates across time between focus and inattention to shape online task performance (deBettencourt et al, 2018, 2019; Decker et al, 2023; Esterman et al, 2013; Fortenbaugh et al, 2018) and memory in each moment (Adam & deBettencourt, 2019; deBettencourt et al, 2018, 2019; Decker et al, 2020). Yet, at present, we know little about how children’s attention fluctuates in terms of the length and frequency of attentional lapses and even less about how these fluctuations govern memory formation from moment to moment.…”