The role of attention in remembering important item-location associations

Abstract

When encountering an excess of information, people are able to selectively remember high-value information by strategically allocating attention during the encoding period, termed value-directed remembering. This has been demonstrated in both the episodic verbal and visuospatial memory domains. Importantly, the allocation of attention also plays a crucial role in the binding of identity and location information in visuospatial memory. We examined how taxing attentional resources to various degrees during encoding might affect visuospatial memory and selectivity. Participants studied items paired with point values indicating their value in a grid display and were asked to maximize their point score (a summation of the points associated with correctly remembered information). Participants viewed items under either a sequential or simultaneous presentation format and in either the presence or absence of a secondary tone discrimination task. While participants in the divided attention conditions recalled fewer item-location associations overall, participants in all encoding conditions prioritized high-value information in memory, providing further evidence that selectivity can be maintained even when attentional resources are taxed. However, differences between presentation formats emerged when conducting spatial resolution analyses examining errors. Errors in the simultaneous conditions were only influenced by item value when attention was full during encoding, while errors in the sequential conditions were not influenced by item value, regardless of available attentional resources. The results suggest participants can strategically allocate attention during encoding even under cognitively-demanding conditions and that gist-based visuospatial memory may only be influenced by information importance when adequate attentional resources are available.

Strategic encoding and enhanced memory for positive value-location associations

“…To examine their overall scoring performance with regard to grid number between the two presentation formats, we conducted a 2 (Presentation format: sequential, simultaneous) × 8 (Grid number: 1, 2, …, 8) mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the overall points-scores. Grid number was included as a factor in this and later analyses as prior research has consistently demonstrated that participants may not optimally execute a value-based study strategy on the first trial, but increase their performance with continued task experience and feedback (Castel, 2008;Middlebrooks et al, 2017;Siegel & Castel, 2018a).…”

“…Prior research investigating the role of value-directed remembering in the visuospatial domain established that items with a higher associated value were consistently better remembered compared to items with a lower value (Ariel et al, 2015;Castel et al, 2002;Middlebrooks et al, 2017;Siegel & Castel, 2018a, 2018b. However, the opportunity to lose points in this kind of paradigm has not been well researched and may have critical implications for participants' study strategies when information varies in importance.…”

“…Despite the demanding nature of associative binding, similar to memory for individual units of information, people can selectively attend to and prioritize associations in memory based on their value. This finding, referred to as valuedirected remembering (VDR; Castel, Benjamin, Craik, & Watkins, 2002;Nguyen, Marini, Zacharczuk, Llano, & Mudar, 2019;Stefanidi, Ellis, & Brewer, 2018), has been found in both the verbal memory domain using unrelated word pairs as stimuli (Ariel, Price, & Hertzog, 2015) and the visuospatial memory domain using item-location associations (Siegel & Castel, 2018a, 2018b. The ability to selectively prioritize information in memory is maintained under various Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01034-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.…”

“…Procedure The procedure used in this study was based upon methodologies used in prior experiments investigating VDR (e.g., Castel et al, 2002;Hayes, Kelly, & Smith, 2013;Robison & Unsworth, 2017) and visuospatial memory (e.g., Chalfonte & Johnson, 1996;Thomas et al, 2012;Siegel & Castel, 2018a, 2018b. Participants were instructed that they would be shown a grid with various numbers placed throughout the grid's cells and to remember the locations of the values for a later test.…”

“…That is, in a typical associative VDR task, participants are instructed that a particular word pair or itemlocation pair is worth a certain amount of points if correctly remembered or correctly replaced in a location (e.g., CHAIR-DOG -8 points, hammer in top left corner of grid array -3 points, for words and items that range in point values from 1 to 10). Participants are instructed to maximize their point score, which leads to an attentional focus on and better memory for high-value over low-value information (Castel et al, 2002;Middlebrooks, Kerr, & Castel, 2017;Siegel & Castel, 2018a). In these studies, and others like them, however, participants are not penalized if the paired associate is not recalled or an item is misplaced during the testing phase.…”