Abstract
Attention and memory are fundamental cognitive processes that closely interact. In the attentional boost effect (ABE), the stimuli that co-occur with targets are remembered better than those that co-occur with distractors in target detection tasks performed during memory encoding. In target detection tasks performed during retrieval, the stimuli that co-occur with targets are recognized as ‘old’ more easily than the stimuli that co-occur with distractors. This study mainly explored the internal mechanism of the effect of target detection on recognition. In Experiment 1, the full attention (FA; where participants performed only the memory task) condition was used to compare with divided attention (DA; where participants performed target detection while performing memory retrieval) condition to explore the impact of target detection and distraction inhibition on recognition. In Experiment 2, the proportion of old and new words in the retrieval stage was adjusted to 1:1 to eliminate the possible reaction tendency caused by the high proportion of old words. In Experiment 3, the presentation time of words was extended to 1.5 s and 3 s to eliminate the possible impact of rapid processing. The results indicated that the effect of target detection on recognition was attributed to both target detection and distraction rejection and is not affected by the ratio of old and new words and the word presentation time. The effect of target detection on recognition may be owing to temporal yoking of the dual tasks, which is different from the effect of target detection on memory encoding.
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Data Availability
The data for this study is publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform. The link to access the data is: https://osf.io/9v5pa/. This fulfills the data availability requirement for the journal.
Data and code availability
The data and materials for all experiments are available at OSF (https://osf.io/9v5pa/).
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31800906), the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2023QN03004), and the Fundamental Research Fund for the Inner Mongolia Normal University (2023JBYJ022).
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Y.D.: Conceptualization, methodology, software, data curation, writing—original draft preparation, writing—reviewing and editing
F.X.: Conceptualization, writing—reviewing and editing
Y.M.: Conceptualization, methodology, writing—reviewing and editing
Z.Y.: Writing—reviewing and editing
Y.T.: Writing—reviewing and editing
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Dong, Y., Xiao, F., Meng, Y. et al. The effect of target detection on memory retrieval. Atten Percept Psychophys 86, 838–854 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02851-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02851-4