scholarly journals Selective attention and recognition: Effects of congruency on episodic learning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara M Rosner ◽  
Maria C. D'Angelo ◽  
Ellen MacLellan ◽  
Bruce Milliken

AbstractRecent research on cognitive control has focused on the learning consequences of high selective attention demands in selective attention tasks (e.g., Botvinick, 2007; Verguts & Notebaert, 2008). The current study extends these ideas by examining the influence of selective attention demands on remembering. In Experiment 1, participants read aloud the red word in a pair of red and green spatially interleaved words. Half of the items were congruent (the interleaved words had the same identity), and the other half were incongruent (the interleaved words had different identities). Following the naming phase, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test. In this test phase, recognition memory was better for incongruent than for congruent items. In Experiment 2, context was only partially reinstated at test, and again recognition memory was better for incongruent than for congruent items. In Experiment 3, all of the items contained two different words, but in one condition the words were presented close together and interleaved, while in the other condition the two words were spatially separated. Recognition memory was better for the interleaved than for the separated items. This result rules out an interpretation of the congruency effects on recognition in Experiments 1 and 2 that hinges on stronger relational encoding for items that have two different words. Together, the results support the view that selective attention demands for incongruent items lead to encoding that improves recognition.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara M Rosner ◽  
Raúl López-Benítez ◽  
Maria C. D'Angelo ◽  
David R. Thomson ◽  
Bruce Milliken

The present study examines the effect of immediate repetition on recognition memory. In a series of 4 experiments, the study phase task was to name aloud a word that was immediately preceded by either the same word (repeated trials) or a different word (not-repeated trials). Across experiments, performance in the study phase demonstrated the anticipated benefit in naming times for repeated trials. More important, performance in the test phase revealed greater sensitivity for not-repeated than repeated trials. This effect was observed even when repetitions at study were separated by an unrelated word (Experiment 3), and was eliminated only when participants named both words in succession at study (Experiment 4). These findings fit nicely with the desirable difficulty principle (R. A. Bjork, 1994), as they demonstrate that items more easily processed at study (i.e., repeated items) are not as well-encoded as items that are more difficult to process at study (i.e., not-repeated items). Furthermore, the current study points to the possibility that attentional orienting in response to processing difficulty may constitute a broadly important cognitive control adaptation that impacts memory encoding.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara M Rosner ◽  
Bruce Milliken

Two recent studies have reported that incongruent selective attention items are better remembered than congruent items on a surprise recognition memory test (Krebs, Boehler, De Belder, & Egner, 2013; Rosner, D’Angelo, MacLellan, & Milliken, 2014). These findings suggest that an increased need for cognitive control may trigger encoding mechanisms at the time of study that result in better recognition of those items at test, a form of the desirable difficulty effect (Bjork, 1994). The experiments in the present paper demonstrate that this effect can depend on whether differences in selective attention difficulty are blocked or intermixed at the time of encoding. These results suggest that additional encoding time itself does not invariably result in better recognition for more difficult selective attention items. Instead, the dependence of recognition memory on encoding difficulty appears to reflect a context-sensitive control response to encoding difficulty.


1976 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Boone ◽  
Harold M. Friedman

Reading and writing performance was observed in 30 adult aphasic patients to determine whether there was a significant difference when stimuli and manual responses were varied in the written form: cursive versus manuscript. Patients were asked to read aloud 10 words written cursively and 10 words written in manuscript form. They were then asked to write on dictation 10 word responses using cursive writing and 10 words using manuscript writing. Number of words correctly read, number of words correctly written, and number of letters correctly written in the proper sequence were tallied for both cursive and manuscript writing tasks for each patient. Results indicated no significant difference in correct response between cursive and manuscript writing style for these aphasic patients as a group; however, it was noted that individual patients varied widely in their success using one writing form over the other. It appeared that since neither writing form showed better facilitation of performance, the writing style used should be determined according to the individual patient’s own preference and best performance.


Author(s):  
Stefan Scherbaum ◽  
Simon Frisch ◽  
Maja Dshemuchadse

Abstract. Folk wisdom tells us that additional time to make a decision helps us to refrain from the first impulse to take the bird in the hand. However, the question why the time to decide plays an important role is still unanswered. Here we distinguish two explanations, one based on a bias in value accumulation that has to be overcome with time, the other based on cognitive control processes that need time to set in. In an intertemporal decision task, we use mouse tracking to study participants’ responses to options’ values and delays which were presented sequentially. We find that the information about options’ delays does indeed lead to an immediate bias that is controlled afterwards, matching the prediction of control processes needed to counter initial impulses. Hence, by using a dynamic measure, we provide insight into the processes underlying short-term oriented choices in intertemporal decision making.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7040
Author(s):  
Beat Meier ◽  
Michèle C. Muhmenthaler

Perceptual fluency, that is, the ease with which people perceive information, has diverse effects on cognition and learning. For example, when judging the truth of plausible but incorrect information, easy-to-read statements are incorrectly judged as true while difficult to read statements are not. As we better remember information that is consistent with pre-existing schemata (i.e., schema congruency), statements judged as true should be remembered better, which would suggest that fluency boosts memory. Another line of research suggests that learning information from hard-to-read statements enhances subsequent memory compared to easy-to-read statements (i.e., desirable difficulties). In the present study, we tested these possibilities in two experiments with student participants. In the study phase, they read plausible statements that were either easy or difficult to read and judged their truth. To assess the sustainability of learning, the test phase in which we tested recognition memory for these statements was delayed for 24 h. In Experiment 1, we manipulated fluency by presenting the statements in colors that made them easy or difficult to read. In Experiment 2, we manipulated fluency by presenting the statements in font types that made them easy or difficult to read. Moreover, in Experiment 2, memory was tested either immediately or after a 24 h delay. In both experiments, the results showed a consistent effect of schema congruency, but perceptual fluency did not affect sustainable learning. However, in the immediate test of Experiment 2, perceptual fluency enhanced memory for schema-incongruent materials. Thus, perceptual fluency can boost initial memory for schema-incongruent memory most likely due to short-lived perceptual traces, which are cropped during consolidation, but does not boost sustainable learning. We discuss these results in relation to research on the role of desirable difficulties for student learning, to effects of cognitive conflict on subsequent memory, and more generally in how to design learning methods and environments in a sustainable way.


1971 ◽  
Vol 33 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1335-1342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Gopher ◽  
Daniel Kahneman

A dichotic listening test was constructed which requires S to monitor a relevant message and to ignore a concurrent message presented to the other ear. The test has promising validity for predicting different criteria of proficiency in flying high-performance aircraft. An analysis of the most valid type of errors suggests that a change in an existing orientation is accompanied by a transient instability of selective attention. Most errors in continuous attention are omissions, which indicate a failure of the listening set. Intrusions, which indicate a failure of selectivity, are rare and their frequency is not correlated to flight criteria.


1986 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
June E. Chance ◽  
Alvin G. Goldstein ◽  
Blake Andersen

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (7) ◽  
pp. 1373-1382 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. C. Murphy ◽  
A. Michael ◽  
B. J. Sahakian

BackgroundDepression is associated with alterations of emotional and cognitive processing, and executive control in particular. Previous research has shown that depressed patients are impaired in their ability to shift attention from one emotional category to another, but whether this shifting deficit is more evident on emotional relative to non-emotional cognitive control tasks remains unclear.MethodThe performance of patients with major depressive disorder and matched healthy control participants was compared on neutral and emotional variants of a dynamic cognitive control task that requires participants to shift attention and response from one category to another.ResultsRelative to controls, depressed patients were impaired on both tasks, particularly in terms of performance accuracy. In the neutral go/no-go task, the ability of depressed patients to flexibly shift attention and response from one class of neutral stimuli to the other was unimpaired. This contrasted with findings for the emotional go/no-go task, where responding was slower specifically on blocks of trials that required participants to shift attention and response from one emotional category to the other.ConclusionsThe present data indicate that any depression-related difficulties with cognitive flexibility and control may be particularly evident on matched tasks that require processing of relevant emotional, rather than simply neutral, stimuli. The implications of these findings for our developing understanding of cognitive and emotional control processes in depression are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Kunar ◽  
Derrick Watson ◽  
Rhiannon Richards ◽  
Daniel Gunnell

Previous work has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to an impairment of visual attention. Gunnell et al. (2020) investigated the locus of these dual-task impairments and found that although phone conversations led to cognitive delays in response times, other mechanisms underlying particular selective attention tasks were unaffected. Here we investigated which attentional networks, if any, were impaired by having a phone conversation. We used the Attentional Network Task (ANT) to evaluate performance of the alerting, orienting and executive attentional networks, both in conditions where people were engaged in a conversation and where they were silent. Two experiments showed that there was a robust delay in response across all three networks. However, at the individual network level, holding a conversation did not influence the size of the alerting or orienting effects but it did reduce the size of the conflict effect within the executive network. The findings suggest that holding a conversation can reduce the overall speed of responding and, via its influence on the executive network, can reduce the amount of information that can be processed from the environment.


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