What holds your attention?: the neural effects of memory on attention

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Parks, Emily Leonard
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

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The allocation of attention, including the initial orienting and the subsequent dwell-time, is affected by several bottom-up and top-down factors. How item-memory affects these processes, however, remains unclear. In four behavioral experiments, we investigated whether item-memory affects attentional dwell time by using a modified version of the attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Our results revealed that the AB was significantly affected by memory-status (novel versus old), but critically this effect depended on the ongoing memory context. To directly examine the neural effects of memory and memory context on attentional allocation, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while subjects performed a modified cuing paradigm. Our results revealed that memory significantly affects target processing at both early and late stages of analysis. Specifically, targets following memorially unique, old (previously studied) cues showed increased visual processing and faster reaction times compared to targets following non-unique cues. These data provide new evidence that memory affects attention at the neural level, and that this effect occurs at early visual processing levels (as indexed by the P1) and at higher order stages of processing (as indexed by the P300).

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