Mulligan Neil W, Smith S Adam, Spataro Pietro
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2016 Apr;42(4):598-607. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000183. Epub 2015 Sep 7.
Stimuli co-occurring with targets in a detection task are better remembered than stimuli co-occurring with distractors-the attentional boost effect (ABE). The ABE is of interest because it is an exception to the usual finding that divided attention during encoding impairs memory. The effect has been demonstrated in tests of item memory but it is unclear if context memory is likewise affected. Some accounts suggest enhanced perceptual encoding or associative binding, predicting an ABE on context memory, whereas other evidence suggests a more abstract, amodal basis of the effect. In Experiment 1, context memory was assessed in terms of an intramodal perceptual detail, the font and color of the study word. Experiment 2 examined context memory cross-modally, assessing memory for the modality (visual or auditory) of the study word. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed context memory with list discrimination, in which 2 study lists are presented and participants must later remember which list (if either) a test word came from. In all experiments, item (recognition) memory was also assessed and consistently displayed a robust ABE. In contrast, the attentional-boost manipulation did not enhance context memory, whether defined in terms of visual details, study modality, or list membership. There was some evidence that the mode of responding on the detection task (motoric response as opposed to covert counting of targets) may impact context memory but there was no evidence of an effect of target detection, per se. In sum, the ABE did not occur in context memory with verbal materials.
在检测任务中与目标同时出现的刺激比与干扰物同时出现的刺激更容易被记住——这就是注意增强效应（ABE）。ABE之所以令人感兴趣，是因为它是编码过程中注意力分散会损害记忆这一常见发现的一个例外。该效应已在项目记忆测试中得到证实，但尚不清楚情境记忆是否同样会受到影响。一些观点认为是增强了知觉编码或联想绑定，预测情境记忆中会出现ABE，而其他证据则表明该效应有更抽象、非模态的基础。在实验1中，情境记忆是根据模态内的知觉细节（即学习单词的字体和颜色）来评估的。实验2跨模态地考察情境记忆，评估对学习单词的模态（视觉或听觉）的记忆。实验3和实验4用列表辨别来评估情境记忆，即呈现两个学习列表，参与者随后必须记住测试单词来自哪个列表（如果有的话）。在所有实验中，还评估了项目（识别）记忆，并且始终显示出强大的ABE。相比之下，注意增强操作并没有增强情境记忆，无论情境记忆是根据视觉细节、学习模态还是列表成员关系来定义的。有一些证据表明，检测任务中的反应模式（运动反应而非对目标的隐蔽计数）可能会影响情境记忆，但没有证据表明目标检测本身会产生影响。总之，使用言语材料时，情境记忆中不会出现ABE。
