Department of Psychology, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Jun;28(3):937-945. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01856-y. Epub 2021 Jan 14.
Does the strength of representations in long-term memory (LTM) depend on which type of attention is engaged? We tested participants' memory for objects seen during visual search. We compared implicit memory for two types of objects-related-context nontargets that grabbed attention because they matched the target defining feature (i.e., color; top-down attention) and salient distractors that captured attention only because they were perceptually distracting (bottom-up attention). In Experiment 1, the salient distractor flickered, while in Experiment 2, the luminance of the salient distractor was alternated. Critically, salient and related-context nontargets produced equivalent attentional capture, yet related-context nontargets were remembered far better than salient distractors (and salient distractors were not remembered better than unrelated distractors). These results suggest that LTM depends not only on the amount of attention but also on the type of attention. Specifically, top-down attention is more effective in promoting the formation of memory traces than bottom-up attention.
长期记忆（LTM）中的表象强度是否取决于所涉及的注意类型？我们测试了参与者对在视觉搜索中看到的物体的记忆。我们比较了两种与物体相关的上下文非目标的内隐记忆，这些非目标之所以能引起注意，是因为它们与目标的定义特征（即颜色）相匹配（自上而下的注意），而引人注意的分散注意力的干扰物则只是因为它们在感知上有干扰性（自下而上的注意）。在实验 1 中，引人注意的干扰物闪烁，而在实验 2 中，引人注意的干扰物的亮度交替变化。关键是，引人注意的和与上下文相关的非目标产生了等效的注意捕获，但与上下文相关的非目标比引人注意的干扰物记忆得好得多（而引人注意的干扰物记忆得并不比不相关的干扰物好）。这些结果表明，LTM 不仅取决于注意力的数量，还取决于注意的类型。具体来说，自上而下的注意比自下而上的注意更有效地促进记忆痕迹的形成。
