Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information

Children exhibit superior memory for attended but outdated information compared to adults

“…For example, using the direct forgetting paradigm 43 , 45 or Think/No-Think paradigm 46 , it was found that children often failed to inhibit unwanted information that had become unnecessary for the current task. The critical difference between these studies and the present study is that, while these studies focuse on the ability to remove outdated information that has already been stored in memory, the current study focuses on the ability to prevent outdated information from entering memory 22 – 25 . These abilities are thought as two important ways of how inhibitory mechanisms regulate the contents of memory 38 .…”

“…These studies reveal that the information selected by attention is not necessarily selected into working memory; instead, working memory has a reselection process for information that had been fully attended. This process is termed as memory selection to distinguish it from attentional selection 24 , 25 . The memory selection enables our brain to filter out the attended yet outdated information, constituting an efficient information-selection system together with attentional selection.…”

Conceptual information of meaningful objects is stored incidentally.

“…Possibly, searching for a target in a crowded display encourages a deeper level of processing of the target objects (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), resulting in stronger and more detailed memory representations, especially for those tasks that impose difficult search (e.g., conjunction search in Guevara Pinto et al, 2020; Williams et al, 2005). Additionally, our task instructed participants to only remember and recall a surface feature—color—of the objects during presurprise trials, which might have discouraged participants to encode detailed shape information to optimize memory encoding resources (Bates et al, 2019; Fu et al, 2023), compared to other tasks where participants searched for objects and reported their presence (Castelhano & Henderson, 2005; Williams et al, 2005). Thus, while incidental memory of object detail may be poor when remembering specific features of objects, this may be different in other tasks where the requirements for memory encoding are less specified.…”

Unconscious Perception of Vernier Offsets

“…A third possible source of 2IFC errors is memory failures, by which observers might consciously experience the offset in one interval and then forget which interval it was by the time they are asked to report it (see Fu et al ( 2023 ) for a review on attribute amnesia). In order to determine the effect of memory failures, we separately analyzed 2IFC performance for trials in which the task-relevant feature was presented in the first, and second interval.…”

“…In addition to fitting the models to the entire datasets, we fitted them separately to trials in which the task-relevant feature was in the first vs. in the second interval. This enabled testing for the effect of attribute amnesia (Fu et al, 2023 ). After fitting, we extracted population-level posterior predictions about performance differences depending on which interval contained the offset.…”