Open AccessIncidental biasing of attention from visual long-term memory.
Author(s) -
Judith E. Fan,
Nicholas B. TurkBrowne
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of experimental psychology. learning, memory, and cognition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1939-1285
pISSN - 0278-7393
DOI - 10.1037/xlm0000209
Subject(s) - working memory , task (project management) , cognitive psychology , visual short term memory , term (time) , computer science , short term memory , visual memory , psycinfo , long term memory , attentional control , visual search , iconic memory , software deployment , isolation (microbiology) , psychology , cognition , neuroscience , physics , management , medline , quantum mechanics , political science , law , economics , operating system , microbiology and biotechnology , biology
Holding recently experienced information in mind can help us achieve our current goals. However, such immediate and direct forms of guidance from working memory are less helpful over extended delays or when other related information in long-term memory is useful for reaching these goals. Here we show that information that was encoded in the past but is no longer present or relevant to the task also guides attention. We examined this by associating multiple unique features with novel shapes in visual long-term memory (VLTM), and subsequently testing how memories for these objects biased the deployment of attention. In Experiment 1, VLTM for associated features guided visual search for the shapes, even when these features had never been task-relevant. In Experiment 2, associated features captured attention when presented in isolation during a secondary task that was completely unrelated to the shapes. These findings suggest that long-term memory enables a durable and automatic type of memory-based attentional control. (PsycINFO Database Record