MemoryAndAttention

Some of the language that is used to describe memory mechanisms sounds a lot like the language used to describe attention. And some of the methods used to study memory are similar to the methods used to study attention. Is this just a professional accident where a common community leads to similar terms and tools? Or is this a reflection that there are some deeper, functional dependencies? This became a live question for me when I read this paper by Liu & Becker that used a procedure very similar to one that I had used with a, then, graduate student: Michael Druker. When I had the chance to work with Christie Haskell it seemed like an excellent chance to re-visit this issue. In our recently published paper, Christie and I replicated the work of Liu & Becker, and compared memory effects to cueing effects. Some interesting results (and careful reviewers) led us eventually to a series of five experiments. We looked at the effect of simultaneous and sequential presentations of targets with and without cues, where the cues could be informative or not, valid or not, and preceded either the first or second stimulus when stimuli were shown sequentially. Some simple mixture model fitting also comes into play. We do find the memory effects seem to be most prominently on the likehood of guessing whereas the attentional effects for informative cues are more at the level of response precision. For uninformative cues, guessing again seems to be the locus. When a cue means something you get more precise responses. There may be more to mine from these data and this approach, and we welcome any comments or feedback.