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.
New paper using drift diffusion models to examine the effects of target detection on episodic memory!
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