Children exhibit superior memory for attended but outdated information compared to adults.

Research on the development of cognitive selectivity predominantly focuses on attentional selection. The present study explores another facet of cognitive selectivity-memory selection-by examining the ability to filter attended yet outdated information in young children and adults. Across five experiments involving 130 children and 130 adults, participants are instructed to use specific information to complete a task, and then unexpectedly asked to report this information in a surprise test. The results consistently demonstrate a developmental reversal-like phenomenon, with children outperforming adults in reporting this kind of attended yet outdated information. Furthermore, we provide evidence against the idea that the results are due to different processing strategies or attentional deployments between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed in young children, resulting in their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory retention.

The object as the unit for state switching in visual working memory.

This study aimed to determine the unit for switching representational states in visual working memory (VWM). Two opposing hypotheses were investigated: (a) the unit of switching being a feature (feature-based hypothesis), and (b) the unit of switching being an object (object-based hypothesis). Participants (N = 180) were instructed to hold two features from either one or two objects in their VWM. The memory-driven attentional capture effect, suggesting that actively held information in VWM can cause attention to be drawn towards matched distractors, was employed to assess representational states of the first and second probed colors (indicated by a retro-cue). The results showed that only the feature indicated to be probed first could elicit memory related capture for the condition of separate objects. Importantly, features from an integrated object could guide attention regardless of the probe order. These findings were observed across three experiments involving features of different dimensions, same dimensions, or perceptual objects defined by Gestalt principles. They provide convergent evidence supporting the object-based hypothesis by indicating that features within a single object cannot exist in different states.

Unconscious prioritization for face-to-face people.

One central question in the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness is regarding the scope of human consciousness. There is a lively debate as to whether high-level information integration is necessarily dependent on consciousness. This study presents a new form of unconscious integration based on the facingness between two individuals. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, Experiments 1-3 found that two facing human heads got a privilege in breaking into awareness compared to nonfacing pairs. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that the breakthrough difference between facing and nonfacing pairs could not be attributed to low-level or mid-level factors. Experiments 6, 7a, and 7b showed that the unconscious priority of facing pairs was significantly diminished when the holistic processing of the two agents was disrupted. Experiments 8-11 demonstrated that the advantage of facing pairs was only observable for human agents and not for daily objects, directional arrows, or nonhuman animals. These findings have critical implications for better understanding the scope of human consciousness and the origins of social vision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information.

Attention has been regarded as the 'gatekeeper' controlling what information gets selected into working memory. However, a new perspective has emerged with the discovery of attribute amnesia, a phenomenon revealing that people are frequently unable to report information they have just attended to moments ago. This report failure is thought to stem from a lack of consolidating the attended information into working memory, indicating a dissociation between attention and working memory. Building on these findings, a new concept called memory reselection is proposed to describe a secondary round of selection among the attended information. These discoveries challenge the conventional view of how attention and working memory are related and shed new light onto modeling attention and memory as dissociable processes.

The linear impact of visual working memory load on visual awareness: Evidence from motion-induced blindness.

Despite the close relationship between visual working memory (VWM) and visual awareness, the question of how these two constructs interact with each other is still under debate. The current study aimed to further address this issue by investigating whether and how visual awareness is influenced by VWM load. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to perform a motion-induced blindness (MIB) task while simultaneously memorizing different numbers of items in VWM. The results indicated that the latency of MIB was prolonged gradually as the VWM load increased, revealing a linear trend in the modulation effect of VWM load on visual awareness. Experiments 2 and 3 tested the other potential explanations and validated the initial finding by confirming that VWM load was indeed responsible for the observed effect on visual awareness. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the relationship between VWM and visual awareness.

More attention with less working memory: The active inhibition of attended but outdated information.

Attention has traditionally been regarded as a gateway to working memory, and almost all theoretical frameworks of attention and working memory assume that individuals always have a better memory for information that has received more attention. Here, we provide a series of counterintuitive demonstrations that show that paying more attention to a piece of information impedes, rather than enhances, the selection of this information into working memory. Experiments 1 to 5 provide converging evidence for an even weaker working memory trace of fully attended but outdated features, compared with baseline irrelevant features that were completely ignored. This indicates that the brain actively inhibits attended but outdated information to prevent it from entering working memory. Experiment 6 demonstrates that this inhibition processing is subject to executive control. These findings lead to a substantial reinterpretation of the relationship between attention and working memory.

Does consciousness overflow cognitive access? Novel insights from the new phenomenon of attribute amnesia.

The moment we open our eyes, we experience a rich and detailed visual world, but the amount of information available to report is rather limited. This dissociation relates to a major debate regarding the nature of visual consciousness. The overflow argument suggests that our conscious experience is quite rich and far beyond what can be reported, standing in sharp contrast to the no-overflow argument that visual consciousness is severely impoverished and limited to what can be reported. In this paper, we systematically reviewed existing evidence in favor of the overflow argument, including studies of several variations of the iconic memory paradigm and the divided attention paradigm, as well as studies of neural correlates of consciousness. Simultaneously, we expounded some critical objections and alternative interpretations to such evidence, as well as some opposing evidence. Finally, we introduced a series of our recent studies based on a striking phenomenon of attribute amnesia, which we believe could provide new insight into the overflow view of visual consciousness.

Consciousness can overflow report: Novel evidence from attribute amnesia of a single stimulus.

There is a long-standing debate on whether visual consciousness is confined to cognitive access measured by reportability, or whether it is rich and overflows reportability. Much of the debate in previous studies concentrated on whether information outside attentional focus could be consciously experienced and reportable. This study sought to address the debate from a new perspective, through testing whether fully attended supraliminal information is necessarily reportable with a variation of attribute amnesia. Participants were asked to judge the parity of a single number or whether a Chinese character referred to furniture. After several trials, they were unexpectedly asked to report the stimulus identity. The results consistently showed that participants could not correctly report the identity, indicating that fully attended information that was consciously perceived could sometimes overflow report. In addition to providing novel overflow evidence, these findings also have crucial implications in understanding the relationship between consciousness and working memory.

Source information is inherently linked to working memory representation for auditory but not for visual stimuli.

Failing to remember the source of retrievable information is known as source amnesia. This phenomenon has been extensively investigated in long-term memory but rarely in working memory, as we share the intuition that the source information of an item that we have encountered in the immediate past is always available. However, a recent study (Chen, Carlson, & Wyble, 2018) challenged this common sense by showing the source amnesia for simple visual stimuli (e.g., colored square) in the context of working memory when participants did not expect having to report source information, which indicated that the source information of visual stimuli was not automatically encoded into working memory. The current study sought to further examine this newly discovered phenomenon by testing whether it persists with complex and meaningful stimuli in the visual modality (Experiments 1, 4a & 4b), cross-visual-and-auditory modalities (Experiments 2a & 2b), and within-auditory modality (Experiment 3). Interestingly, the results revealed that short-term source amnesia was a robust effect in the visual modality even for complex and meaningful stimuli, whereas it was absent in the cross-visual-and-auditory or within-auditory modalities, regardless of reporting expectation. This indicates differences in working memory representations of visual and auditory stimuli, namely, the representation of auditory stimuli was stored together with the corresponding original sources, while that of visual stimuli was stored independently of its source information. These findings have crucial implications for further clarifying the longstanding debate regarding whether or not there is a modality-independent working memory storage system for different modalities.

Does attribute amnesia occur with the presentation of complex, meaningful stimuli? The answer is, "it depends".

Attribute amnesia (AA) is a recently reported phenomenon whereby participants are unable to report a salient attribute of a stimulus (e.g., the color or identity of a target letter) on which their attention has just been focused during a prior task. This counterintuitive effect has been repeatedly replicated with various simple stimuli such as digits and letters. The current study sought to explore boundaries of AA by investigating whether the phenomenon persists when participants encounter complex, meaningful stimuli (e.g., pictures) that have been shown to hold an advantage in cognitive processing and memory. In Experiments 1a-d, we examined whether AA was observed with different types of complex stimuli. In Experiments 2a-b and 3a-b, we linked the type of stimuli (simple vs. complex and meaningful stimuli) to the other two potential boundary factors of AA (i.e., repetitiveness of target stimulus and set effects of Einstellung) to see whether there were interactions between stimuli type and these two boundary factors. The results demonstrated that the AA effect was still consistently observed for complex stimuli in a typical AA paradigm wherein participants encountered many trials and the targets were repeated across trials. However, this effect only appeared for simple stimuli, but not for complex stimuli in two special cases: when target stimuli were never repeated through the experiment, or when the surprise test was placed on the first trial of the experiment. These findings have crucial implications in understanding the boundaries of the AA phenomenon.