Premembering Experience: A Hierarchy of Time-Scales for Proactive Attention

Abstract

Memories are about the past, but they serve the future. Memory research often emphasizes the former aspect: focusing on the functions that reconstitute (re-member) experience and elucidating the various types of memories and their interrelations, timescales, and neural bases. Here we highlight the prospective nature of memory in guiding selective attention, focusing on functions that use previous experience to anticipate the relevant events about to unfold-to ''premember'' experience. Memories of various types and timescales play a fundamental role in guiding perception and performance adaptively, proactively, and dynamically. Consonant with this perspective, memories are often recorded according to expected future demands. Using working memory as an example, we consider how mnemonic content is selected and represented for future use. This perspective moves away from the traditional representational account of memory toward a functional account in which forward-looking memory traces are informationally and computationally tuned for interacting with incoming sensory signals to guide adaptive behavior.

Preparation for upcoming attentional states in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex

“…These interactions may be the means by which mnemonically relevant information in the environment is detected and used to guide attention and perception. Thus, our work demonstrates the adaptive function of memories by highlighting the mechanisms by which past experiences can be used to prepare for future behaviors (Nobre & Stokes, 2019)…”

“…Attention can be guided by many forms of memory at multiple timescales (Nobre & Stokes, 2019). Which are at play in the current study?…”

“…In sum, multiple timescales of memory likely contributed to performance in the current task (Hutchinson & Turk-Browne, 2012;Nobre & Stokes, 2019): long-term, overlearned memories; intermediate-term episodic memories; and working memory. Future studies will be useful for understanding the similarities and differences between attentional guidance by memories at these timescales.…”

“…Instead, our attentional states are often guided by past experiences in similar situations. Such memory-guided attention is effective in guiding goal-directed behavior (Aly & Turk-Browne, 2017;Chen & Hutchinson, 2018;Nobre & Stokes, 2019) but is relatively under-explored. Here, we examine the neural mechanisms underlying memory-guided attention, with the aim of determining the nature of neural representations that enable past experiences to be used to prepare for upcoming attentional goals.…”

Complex naturalistic stimuli are prioritized by attention when maintained in visual working memory

“…Contemporary theories of memory emphasize its role in the prospective guidance of perception and action (Nobre and Stokes, 2019). Particularly, the working memory (WM) system is currently recognized as the key component of the pro-active top-down selection mechanism (Desimone and Duncan, 1995;Nobre and Stokes, 2019). While WM plays an important role in the volitional control of attention, it can also influence attentional selection in an involuntary way.…”