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 followup 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.

Attribute amnesia (AA) describes a phenomenon in which participants are unable to report an attribute that was just attended to select a target. Most studies investigating this effect used simple stimuli like letters and digits. The few studies using meaningful stimuli, however, found AA only when the target stimuli were used repeatedly. We tested the robustness of this boundary condition with a set of artificially generated faces. Participants were instructed to find the young face among 3 older faces and performed this task for the first 27 trials. On the 28th trial, they were unexpectedly asked to report the identity of the young target face they just saw. The following 4 trials repeated this identity question and the target faces never repeated throughout the experiment. Contrary to the previous findings, we observed AA with the current set of meaningful and unique targets. I.e., The pre-surprise location task performance was at ceiling, but the surprise identity accuracy was significantly lower than the following trial. The current finding expands the boundary conditions of AA and suggests that AA is applicable to visual experience that resembles our day-to-day lives.

Memorability denotes a stimulus-intrinsic property that results in stimuli being more likely to be remembered or forgotten. The effect is consistent across observers and can be measured in various stimuli such as faces and scene images. Long-term memory (LTM) paradigms have been used to measure memorability with studies demonstrating long-term memorability effects via incidental and intentional encoding mechanisms. The current study expands the understanding of memorability and examines whether memorability modulates the ability to unexpectedly report an image at short intervals. Three sets of experiments (using faces and scenes) with replications used an Attribute Amnesia (AA) paradigm to measure the effect of memorability on incidental visual working memory (VWM) processes while controlling attentional priorities. When participants had to identify the target image in the immediate trial unexpectedly, we observed that memorable targets yielded a higher accuracy compared to forgettable targets, suggesting that people incidentally remember more information about memorable stimuli even across very short intervals. This memorability benefit was observed for both stimulus types but was greater for faces compared to scenes. Thus, memorability modulates the ability to remember stimuli in an incidental VWM task. These results expand our understanding of the mechanisms behind memorability effects, and how attentional filters impact memory traces.

It is well established that search tasks within natural scenes induce the encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. In this study, we asked whether searches always necessitate memory encoding by using a simple search task to minimize incentives for incidental encoding followed immediately by a visual recall task. Participants repeatedly searched for and located an easily-detected item in novel scenes for numerous trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw the entire scene (Experiment 1) or the object that they had been locating (Experiment 2) directly after being shown a search image. The similarity of the drawings to the original information was assessed by naïve raters. Surprise- trial drawings of the scene and search target were both poorly recognizable as representations of the scene / target itself. The same drawers produced highly recognizable scenes and objects on the next trial when they had an expectation to draw the image. Experiment 3 further showed that the poor surprise trial memory could not merely be attributed to interference caused by the unexpected drawing prompt. Our findings replicate Attribute Amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015) using the method of visual recall through drawing: it is possible to locate a target without creating a memory of it or the scene that it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior. This disconnection between attention and memory might reflect a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.

Visual search is greatly affected by the appearance rate of given target types, such that low prevalence items are harder to detect, which has consequences for real world search tasks where target frequency cannot be balanced. However, targets that are highly-representative of a categorically-defined task set are also easier to find. We hypothesized that targets which are highly-representative are less vulnerable to low prevalence effects because an observer’s attentional set prioritizes guidance toward them even when they are rare. We assessed this hypothesis by first determining the categorical structure of “prohibited carry-ons,” via an exemplar naming task and used this structure to assess how category representativeness interacted with prevalence. Specifically, from the exemplar naming task we selected a commonly named (knives) and rarely named (gas cans) target for a mock airport screening task in which one of the targets was shown infrequently. As predicted, highly-representative targets were found more easily than their less representative counterparts, but they also were less affected by prevalence manipulations. Experiment 1b replicated the results with targets matched for emotional valence (water bottles and fireworks). These findings demonstrate the powerful explanatory power of theories of attentional guidance that incorporate the dynamic influence of recent experience with the knowledge that comes from life experience to better predict behavioral outcomes associated with high-stakes search environments.

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we use a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer’s memory for a search target. In the first set of experiments, participants were tasked to report the identity of the target letter before unexpectedly being asked to read a task-irrelevant passage. We observed that the introduction of this passage interfered with the observer’s memory of the target letter, but this interference only occurred after participants had experience completing the task without interruption. However, a retro-cue placed just prior to the reading prompt reduced this cost, suggesting that participants can rapidly reinforce the information about the target in working memory sufficiently to resist the interference. We then used this same cueing manipulation to test whether information in an attribute amnesia paradigm, which unexpectedly probes an attribute relevant to target selection but irrelevant to participant’s response expectations, could also be protected against such unexpected interference. Using this paradigm, we observed that a retro-cue did not reliably improve performance following the surprising event, which supports theories that attribute amnesia is not caused by interference. These results reveal both the vulnerability and flexibility of working memory, and demonstrate the importance of understanding how the particulars of task design establish expectations which impact the underlying cognitive representations formed by the observer.