Learning how to exploit sources of information

Abstract

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.

Search without building memories: Failure of visual recall for easy search tasks in natural scenes

“…This lends support to the idea that surprise trial failures in Experiment 1 and 2 were due to the lack of incidental memory forming, rather than the memory being damaged due to surprise-related interference. Participants learned to exploit task parameters and subsequently encode into memory only what was believed to be necessary to report post-search (March, 1991;Wyble et al, 2019).…”

“…Rather, the parameters of the search inform an individual's task set, incentivizing the formation of memories if it aids them in completing a task. In other words, participants learn to exploit task parameters in order to optimize performance (March, 1991) Wyble, 2023;Wyble, et al, 2019). Though this can be viewed as a susceptibility of the cognitive system to expectation biases, it also highlights the remarkable ability of the human mind to optimize task performance in mere minutes, both in terms of minimizing resource use as well as quickly correcting to not be caught by surprise a second time.…”

“…This finding extends to other attributes such as the color of a singleton (Born et al, 2019;Harrison et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021), a young face among old faces (Tam et al, 2021), a sad face among happy faces (Chen et al, 2019), the spatial configuration of the search array (O'Donnell et al, 2021), and even the color of a ball that is being carefully tracked in a video of ball-passers for up to a minute . Accuracy in recognizing the target is much higher on the very next trial after the surprise trial, or when the surprise trial occurs on trial 1 in the experiment (Chen et al, 2019;Wyble et al 2019;Hedayati et al, 2022) suggesting that the recognition task is easy when participants have not been led to believe that the visual attributes of the target are unimportant beyond their use in initially finding it.…”

Representation and computation in working memory

“…A second meaning is whether or not an irrelevant feature of a relevant object is automatically represented in WM. Several studies employing surprise tests with discrete report of previously irrelevant sample features observed near-chance performance (Chen and Wyble, 2016;Wyble et al, 2019), and decoding from fMRI or EEG data has shown little evidence for maintenance of task-irrelevant features (Yu and Shim, 2017;Bocincova and Johnson, 2019). However, surprise tests with a continuous report for a colour…”