![]() ![]() However, this does not explain why observers were able to recall the same key attribute on the post-surprise trials accurately without a break or a change in the type of memoranda that released them from the built-up interference ( Bunting, 2006 Wickens, Born & Allen, 1963).Ī common feature of most attribute amnesia experiments is that in the test phase of the surprise trial the distractors are usually highly familiar to the observer. Arguably, the failure to recall a key attribute on the surprise trial could reflect a build-up of proactive interference from previously shown stimuli. This is a key feature of attribute amnesia studies where highly similar stimuli are shown on a successive number of trials. Proactive interference was shown to build up across trials and became most prominent when the materials in the prior lists were highly similar to the recent list ( Keppel & Underwood, 1962 Underwood, 1957). For those who memorised multiple word lists, the initial list inhibited the learning of new words ( Underwood, 1957). Also, the participants who learned a third list recalled only 25% of it correctly. For example, participants who memorised a word list and were tested after two days correctly recalled about 70% of the words however, those who learned a new list one day after learning the initial list only recalled 40% of the new items. It has long been understood that forgetting can be caused by proactive interference, when previously learned information interferes with the retention of recently learned information ( Greenberg & Underwood, 1950 Keppel & Underwood, 1962 Postman & Underwood, 1973). This demonstrates that the amnesia was not due to a limited working memory capacity. On the four subsequent trials, i.e., the post-surprise trials, when the observers were now expecting to identify the target letter, they were able to do so. Although the observers would have attended and processed the target letter when it was presented as part of the stimulus array, most observers were unable to identify the target letter in the test phase of the surprise trial. On the surprise trial, after the stimulus array disappeared, the observers were, without warning, shown a display containing four letters and asked to indicate which one was the target letter that they had just seen. On the eleven pre-surprise trials, once the stimulus array disappeared the observers were presented with four colours and asked to identify the colour of the letter. Three of these characters were digits and one was a letter. For example, in Experiment 1 of Chen & Wyble (2016), in each trial the observer was briefly shown a stimulus array comprising four characters, each a different colour. A typical attribute amnesia experiment starts with an observer performing a number of trials in which they are asked to recall one aspect of a target stimulus before being unexpectedly asked to recall a different aspect of the target stimulus on the “surprise” trial. This challenges the common assumption that information in the focus of attention that has reached access awareness ( Lamme, 2004) should always be reportable immediately after its presentation.įollowing Kanwisher & Driver (1992), attribute amnesia studies have used the term attribute broadly to refer to any aspect (e.g., colour, location, identity) of a visual stimulus ( Chen & Wyble, 2015 Chen & Wyble, 2016). More recently, it has been shown that observers will often be unable to report features of an attended object that are task-relevant but that the observers did not expect to report, a phenomenon referred to as attribute amnesia ( Chen & Wyble, 2015 Chen & Wyble, 2016). In particular, there is evidence that people can selectively encode and maintain a subset of task-relevant features of an attended object and filter out the remaining task-irrelevant features (e.g., Eitam, Yeshurun & Hassan, 2013 Triesch et al., 2003 Woodman & Vogel, 2008). Others dispute this object-based encoding account and argue that observers can remember some features of an object independently of others (e.g., Bays, Wu & Husain, 2011 Fougnie & Alvarez, 2011). Some studies have suggested that visual working memory representations are object-based such that attended objects are encoded in their entirety and all their features are stored in memory irrespective of task relevance (e.g., Luck & Vogel, 1997 Luria & Vogel, 2011 Marshall & Bays, 2013). ![]() The degree to which humans remember information once it ceases to be relevant is a contentious topic in cognitive psychology.
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