Exogenous temporal cues enhance recognition memory in an object-based manner

Object-based attention: A tutorial review

“…Related results were reported by Henik (1977, 1981), who manipulated the perceptual groupings of the stimuli that the participants had to recall and found a higher recall rate when the stimuli were displayed in the same perceptual group rather than in different perceptual groups. Ohyama and Watanabe (2010) observed object-based attentional benefits in memory recognition tasks. Their participants had better recognition memory for letters whose onset coincided with, rather than mismatched, a sudden change that occurred to an object upon which the letters were shown.…”

Temporal and Spatial Predictability of an Irrelevant Event Differently Affect Detection and Memory of Items in a Visual Sequence

“…In our previous study, the events were spatially predictable and temporally unpredictable, and under these conditions, we did not observe an effect on the detection RTs ( Ohyama and Watanabe, 2010 ). However, previous studies have reported that detection RTs were shortened when the target presentation timing was predictable, compared to unpredictable ( Correa et al, 2004 , 2005 ).…”

“…However, if the task and apparatus were not the problem, there are two other hypotheses that may explain these negative results with regard to the detection RT. One hypothesis is that the event drove arousal and reduced the item detection RT, while, at the same time, the event attracted attention, reduced attention on the item as a distractor, and delayed the item detection RT, meaning that these plus and minus effects were offset and not seen in Ohyama and Watanabe’s (2010) study. Another hypothesis is that the event did not enhance detection in the perception process, instead only enhancing the memory process.…”

“… Ohyama and Watanabe (2010) have reported that task-irrelevant visual change events affect recognition memory of a sequence of items, and showed that the memory enhancement effect occurred only for recognition memory accuracy of an item that simultaneously appeared with the task-irrelevant event in a sequence of items. Ohyama and Watanabe (2010) kept the spatio-temporal predictability of the event the same in all experiments; specifically, the event timing was unpredictable, and the event location was predictable. However, whether temporal unpredictability is important, spatial predictability is important, both are important and related, or neither is important has not been confirmed.…”

“…Many previous studies have reported that perception is improved by salient visual events ( Posner, 1980 ; Prinzmetal et al, 1986 ; Egly et al, 1994 ; Moore et al, 1998 ; Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005 ; Zacks et al, 2007 ); therefore, it is possible that a task-irrelevant event affects the early perception process and that this perceptual effect affects later memory processing and improves recognition memory accuracy as an after-effect of the change in perceptual process. We also aimed to confirm if detection reaction times (RTs) of items in a serial presentation are affected by an event, using the stimuli conditions that were found to induce the memory enhancement effect (i.e., a spatially predictable and temporally unpredictable event that occurred at the same location of the item sequence) in a previous study ( Ohyama and Watanabe, 2010 ). However, no event-related effect was found in the detection RT, even when the stimuli conditions were the same.…”