How does attending to a brief, behaviourally relevant stimulus affect episodic memory encoding? In the attentional boost effect, increasing attention to a brief target in a detection task boosts memory for items that are presented at the same time (relative to distractor-paired items). Although the memory advantage for target-paired items is well established, the effects of attending to targets on other aspects of episodic memory encoding are unclear. This study examined the effects of target detection and goal-directed attention on memory for task-irrelevant information from a single event, focusing on the contributions of recollection and familiarity during recognition. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a series of briefly presented faces as they performed a detection task on unrelated squares, pressing the space bar only when the square was a target colour (e.g., blue) rather than a distractor colour (e.g., orange). Half of the participants were told to memorise the faces, and half were told to ignore them. Results indicated that both recollection and familiarity were greater for target-paired faces than for distractor-paired faces, regardless of whether the faces were intentionally encoded. Experiment 2 examined whether these effects are present for single events, replicating the recollection benefit when encoding time is sufficient. Attending to behaviourally relevant targets appears to facilitate both intentional and incidental memory for the background item and the context in which it occurred, boosting subsequent recollection as well as familiarity.

Attention and memory for everyday experiences vary over time, wherein some moments are better attended and subsequently better remembered than others. These effects have been demonstrated in naturalistic viewing tasks with complex and relatively uncontrolled stimuli, as well as in more controlled laboratory tasks with simpler stimuli. For example, in the attentional boost effect (ABE), participants perform two tasks at once: memorizing a series of briefly presented stimuli (e.g., pictures of outdoor scenes) for a later memory test, and responding to other concurrently presented cues that meet pre-defined criteria (e.g., participants press a button for a blue target square and do nothing for a red distractor square). However, rather than increasing dual-task interference, attending to a target cue boosts, rather than impairs, subsequent memory for concurrently presented information. In this review we describe current data on the extent and limitations of the attentional boost effect and whether it may be related to activity in the locus coeruleus neuromodulatory system. We suggest that insight into the mechanisms that produce the attentional boost effect may be found in recent advances in the locus coeruleus literature and from understanding of how the neurocognitive system handles stability and change in everyday events. We consequently propose updates to an early account of the attentional boost effect, the dual-task interaction model, to better ground it in what is currently known about event cognition and the role that the LC plays in regulating brain states.

The Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study (PEERS) aimed to characterize the behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) correlates of memory encoding and retrieval in highly practiced individuals. Across five PEERS experiments, 300+ subjects contributed more than 7,000 90 minute memory testing sessions with recorded EEG data. Here we tell the story of PEERS: its genesis, evolution, major findings, and the lessons it taught us about taking a big science approach to the study of memory and the human brain.

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Variability in attention can influence episodic encoding across multiple time scales. Here we investigate whether this variability can be captured in neural subsequent memory effects. In a scalp EEG study, participants memorized lists of words either under full attention or while performing a continuous target detection task that required them to press a button when the colored squares that appeared with each word were in a pre-defined color. We found that neural subsequent memory effects differed across single- and dual-task conditions. Across diffuse scalp areas, target detection decreased the post-stimulus spectral density of oscillations in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) relative to distractor rejection and single task encoding, and this predicted encoding success. Target detection therefore appears to facilitate encoding through attentional orienting. In addition, like single-task encoding, pre-stimulus high gamma activity (50-100 Hz) facilitated encoding during target trials. No such effects were observed for distractor trials. This suggests that target detection may allow individuals to take advantage of the cognitive states that facilitate encoding under single-task conditions. Temporal attention may influence encoding through discrete mechanisms, one that maintains the system in a "readiness to encode" state, and another that phasically orients it to behaviorally relevant events.

With the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE), responding to a briefly presented target in a detection task enhances the encoding of other items presented at the same time. However, the effects of target detection on context memory for the event in which the stimulus appeared remain unclear. Here, we present findings from verbal free recall and recognition experiments that test the effects of target detection during encoding on temporal and relational aspects of context memory. Consistent with prior demonstrations of limited effects of target detection on context memory, in Experiment 1 there was no evidence that target detection influenced the likelihood of transitioning to items that were presented at similar times during encoding, or that were in the same encoding condition. To better characterize whether these limitations are present even when target detection boosts recollection and relational memory, Experiment 2 added an old/new recognition and relational memory test at the end of the experiment. Unlike previous findings, these results provided only weak evidence of a relational memory advantage for target-paired words. These results indicate that target detection during encoding has minimal effects on the formation of temporal associations between words in memory, and that its effects on other aspects of context memory could be influenced by several task parameters.