Au Ricky K C, Tang Alvin K M
School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, 30 Good Shepherd Street, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Cogn Process. 2025 Mar 14. doi: 10.1007/s10339-025-01266-9.
Cognitive functions such as attention and memory significantly impact performance in daily life and in various professions, including driving vehicles and providing healthcare services. Driven by the importance of understanding attention, early studies have explored the attentional theories and discovered the attentional boost effect (ABE). In experiments studying the ABE, participants are required to engage in two concurrent tasks: (1) memorising a sequence of briefly displayed stimuli (e.g. images or words) for a later memory test and (2) concurrently detecting a simultaneously presented target signal (e.g. pressing a button when seeing a target white square and taking no action for a distractor black square). Surprisingly, attending to a target boosts memory encoding for the concurrently presented information, contrary to the typical expectation of lowered performance owing to dual-task interference. This effect has been documented not only in behavioural experiments across different materials and modalities but also in neuroimaging investigations. This review paper is divided into several main sections, covering the behavioural evidence supporting the ABE, interpretations of the effect from neuroimaging studies, individual differences, consensus and controversies in ABE research as well as prospective future research in this area. The discussion in this review might also offer helpful insights to researchers for translating this phenomenon into real-world practical applications.
注意力和记忆等认知功能对日常生活及包括驾驶车辆和提供医疗服务在内的各种职业表现有着重大影响。受理解注意力重要性的驱动，早期研究探索了注意力理论并发现了注意力增强效应（ABE）。在研究ABE的实验中，要求参与者同时进行两项任务：（1）记住一系列短暂呈现的刺激（如图像或单词）以便稍后进行记忆测试，以及（2）同时检测一个同时呈现的目标信号（例如，看到目标白色方块时按下按钮，看到干扰黑色方块时不采取行动）。令人惊讶的是，关注目标会增强对同时呈现信息的记忆编码，这与由于双重任务干扰而导致表现降低的典型预期相反。这种效应不仅在涉及不同材料和模态的行为实验中得到了记录，在神经成像研究中也有记载。这篇综述论文分为几个主要部分，涵盖支持ABE的行为证据、神经成像研究对该效应的解读、个体差异、ABE研究中的共识与争议以及该领域未来的前瞻性研究。本综述中的讨论也可能为研究人员将这一现象转化为实际应用提供有益的见解。
