Repetition effects in iconic and verbal short-term memory.

The precision of attentional selection is far worse than the precision of the underlying memory representation

“…We used the typical design of experiments on contingent attentional capture where the target is fixed for each participant and is therefore repeated on each trial (Folk & Remington, 1998;Folk et al, 1992). Target repetition is expected to facilitate attentional selection (e.g., Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994) and recall from memory (e.g., Besner, Keating, Cake, & Maddigan, 1974). The second goal was to investigate the effect of task requirements on precision.…”

Priming is not necessary for selective-attention failures: Semantic effects of unattended, unprimed letters

“…For example, Morton (1967) showed that people cannot tell how the letters on a telephone dial are laid out, in spite of thousands of exposures. Turvey (1967) presented one particular display repeatedly in a partial-report paradigm (Sperling, 1967), but subjects did not improve at reporting it (but see Besner, Keating, Cake, & Maddigan, 1974, for a failure to replicate). Neisser and Beeklen (1975) and Beeklen and Cervone (1983) had subjects attend to one of two episodes on a video display, and found that the subjects rarely noticed unusual events in the unattended episode.…”

“…Loftus (1972) found that a decrease in recall for unattended, as compared with attended, pictures could be accounted for entirely by differences in the number of fixations on each picture. Second, unattended material is sometimes remembered in paradigms similar to these (e.g., Besner et al 1974;Goldstein & Fink, 1981;Kellogg, 1980;Rollins & Thibadeau, 1973;Wolford & Morrison, 1980). If subjects sometimes recall the unattended material, then they must have processed it, and these results suggest that experiments finding null effects may have been insensitive in some way.…”

Facilitation by repetition in recognition memory for tonal pitch

“…A given slide was repeatedly presented in alternation with nonrepeated slides, and no effect of repetition was found. However, Besner, Keating, Cake, and Maddigan (1974) used a similar paradigm, but with smaller stimulus arrays of 100-msec duration, and did obtain superior partial report of repeated slides compared with nonrepeated slides. Further, Standing and Da Polito (1968) studied the effect of repeating a single row, in a randomly varying position, in several successive arrays.…”