And Like That, They were Gone: A Failure to Remember Recently Attended Unique Faces

Abstract

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.

Attribute Amnesia in the Auditory Domain

“…But this is not the case. For example, faces are processed by a dedicated area of the brain, the fusiform face area (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006), but AA occurs for face stimuli (Tam et al., 2021). Similarly, area V4 is functionally organised to represent colour (Tanigawa et al., 2010), yet AA readily occurs for colour (H. Chen & Wyble, 2015a).…”

“…It seems that AA occurs partly because our conscious experience is richer than what can be reported (Fu et al., 2021) but also because the degree to which an aspect of an attended stimulus is encoded in visual short-term memory is influenced by whether not the participant expects to report it (Harrison et al., 2021; Wyble et al., 2019). While AA is typically tested using simple images, it will also occur for complex images if the images are repeated (H. Chen & Howe, 2017; H. Chen et al., 2019) and sometimes even if they are not repeated (Tam et al., 2021). AA occurs in both young and older participants (McCormick-Huhn et al., 2018).…”