Attribute Amnesia Reflects a Lack of Memory Consolidation for Attended Information

A recently reported phenomenon, termed attribute amnesia, challenged the commonly held belief that attention plays the determining role in controlling how information is remembered, by showing that participants fail to remember a specific attended attribute (e.g., the target-defining color), even wh...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2016-02, Vol.42 (2), p.225-234
Main Authors: Chen, Hui, Wyble, Brad
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Amnesia
Attention
Attention - physiology
Attributes
Color
Color Perception - physiology
Experimental psychology
Human
Humans
Identity
Information
Memory
Memory Consolidation
Memory Consolidation - physiology
Mental Recall - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Repetition
Space Perception - physiology
Young Adult
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Summary:A recently reported phenomenon, termed attribute amnesia, challenged the commonly held belief that attention plays the determining role in controlling how information is remembered, by showing that participants fail to remember a specific attended attribute (e.g., the target-defining color), even when they had just used that attribute to perform a task (Chen & Wyble, 2015a). The main purpose of the present study sought to better understand the mechanism underlying this phenomenon. The results revealed that attribute amnesia was nearly eliminated once participants were forced to store and hold attended information for a brief time, suggesting that this amnesia effect most likely reflects a lack of memory consolidation for an attended attribute that had been processed to some certain level. In addition, we demonstrated that the effect is not particular to the use of location report or the repetition of targets. One additional finding is that amnesia was markedly absent for location memory, indicating an important difference between memories for locations and attributes such as color or identity.
ISSN:0096-1523
1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/xhp0000133