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Interested in events and naturalistic perception? What about attention? Or memory? Come check out our posters at Psychonomics Friday evening (11/17)!

Karen Sasmita, a graduate student, will present her work examining how functional connectivity of the hippocampus changes around event boundaries during naturalistic viewing.

Jacqueline Kim, an undergraduate honors student, will present her findings from analyses of EEG data that examined the effects of attentional manipulations on the gamma primacy effect (increased EEG spectral power in the gamma band at the beginning of a word list encoding).

The AMP Lab is happy to welcome Nickolas Paternoster as the newest graduate student to the lab. Nick plans to use computational models to investigate the locus coeruleus and attention. Welcome Nick!

Congratulations to all our Spring 2023 graduates, Dr. Adam Broitman, Lilyanna Gross, and John Rosero, for completing your degrees!!

In April, Adam Broitman successfully defended his dissertation, titled “Temporal Attention Modulates Episodic Encoding and EEG Subsequent Memory Effects.” His dissertation focused on the attentional boost effect and the degree to which target detection facilitates aspects of episodic memory using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Adam started a postdoctoral position, working with Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania. Congratulations Adam!

In everyday life, people often must adjust what they are doing after the situation they are in has changed. Previous work on the attentional boost effect suggests that memory encoding is enhanced at these times by a brief boost to perceptual processing known as temporal selection. However, we don’t yet know whether temporal selection boosts memory for the scene as a whole, or whether it depends on how much of the scene is attended. In a new paper titled “Diffusion Decision Modeling of Retrieval Following the Temporal Selection of Behaviorally Relevant Moments”, Turker & Swallow (2022) used drift diffusion modeling to show that memory for which elements appeared together in a scene, and where, is enhanced when they co-occur with pictures that require participants to press a button. Memory for the relationships between elements on the screen was enhanced despite its being irrelevant to the participant’s tasks, and was even stronger when participants were instructed to divide attention across more elements of the scene. This suggests that people better encode the situation they are currently in when they encounter events that require a response.

Despite increased demands on attention, responding to a target in a detection task enhances memory for concurrently presented images and words. First documented in 2010, this attentional boost effect phenomenon has been the subject of a growing amount of research. In a new review paper, titled “Grounding the Attentional Boost Effect in Events and the Efficient Brain”, Swallow, Broitman, Riley, and Turker provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on the attentional boost effect, explicitly compare it to the effects of event segmentation on memory, and describe several ways phasic locus coeruleus activity could influence episodic encoding.

2021-2022 was a big year! Congratulations to Dr. Hamid Turker, Dr. Roy Moyal, Anna Lee, and Sanweda Mahagabin for completing their degrees!!

Roy Moyal successfully defended his dissertation, supervised by Prof. Shimon Edelman, titled “Behavioral Context Modulates the Time Course of Visual Processing and Memory Encoding.” Roy’s dissertation featured some awesome work on the Attentional Boost Effect and consciousness. Congratulations to Roy!

How does responding to a target enhance memory? In a new neuroimaging paper titled “Auditory Target Detection Enhances Visual Processing and Hippocampal Functional Connectivity”, Moyal, Turker, Luh, and Swallow found that responding to auditory targets increased activity in the locus coeruleus, increased the amount of information about the simultaneously presented image in visual cortex. and increased connectivity between the hippocampus and visual regions. These results are consistent with the proposal that the attentional boost effect reflects the engagement of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine neuromodulatory system, briefly increasing the uptake of information by perceptual and episodic memory systems.

Hamid Turker successfully defended his dissertation, titled “Acting on Behaviorally Relevant Events and the Impact This Has on Attention and Memory.” His dissertation spanned a broad range of topics, from the attentional boost effect in episodic memory, to fMRI methods, to an examination of two neuromodulatory systems. Congratulations and well done to our newest Ph.D.!