Attribute Amnesia
Attribute amnesia is the inability to recall and report an attribute of a stimulus when that stimulus had been consciously attended to as little as one second prior to attempted recollection. It is the failure to report an attribute of a stimulus that is known to have reached awareness. The term was coined by Hui Chen and Brad Wyble in 2015 and was the main focus of the their paper, published in 2015, in which they describe and test the phenomenon.[1]
Attribute amnesia is similar to but is not to be confused with Inattentional blindness and change blindness where the inability to report features is the result of the failure to notice the addition of, or change in unexpected stimuli that should otherwise be easy to perceive.
History[edit]
Early Observations[edit]
In the 1990’s researchers explored the idea that stimuli that is consciously perceived at one time may fail to produce a memory trail that can be reported.
In 1997, Cathleen Moore and Howard Egeth made the suggestion that Inattentional blindness may be a result of one failing to remember a stimulus that is perceived but may not reach awareness.[2]
In 1999, Jeremy Wolfe expanded on the suggestions of Moore and Egeth by suggesting that the failure to remember might extend to stimuli that had reached full awareness. He coined this “Inattentional Amnesia".[3]
Theories[edit]
Memory Consolidation[edit]
The idea that the amnesia effect is most likely caused by lack of memory consolidation for a previously processed, attended attribute. Participants in the experiment by Hui Chen and Brad Wyble often did not fail to recall an attended attribute when they were forced to store and hold the information in their memory for a brief amount of time.[4]
Novel Stimuli[edit]
A common feature of most attribute amnesia experiments is the use of familiar stimuli during the surprise trial. It was suggested that participants might struggle to recall the familiar target due to the distractor stimuli also being familiar. Following the idea that long-term memory traces are created for everything we see, regardless of whether the task requires us to do so, it was suggested that it might be easier to remember target attributes if distractors were novel.[5]
Working Memory[edit]
The idea that the reason participants failed to recall attributes of previously attended stimuli during a surprise trial was due to the overwriting or working memory contents that was caused by the surprise questioning and task requirements.[6]
Experiments[edit]
Failure to Report Attended Information That Had Just Reached Conscious Awareness[edit]
Attribute amnesia was the finding of an experiment by Hui Chen and Brad Wyble. Participants took part in four experiments made up of multiple trials where they required to locate a target attribute (such as a letter) among three distractors (such as numbers). This was the pre-surprise phase. The attribute that was to be identified varied across experiments (identify a letter among numbers (experiments 1a, 1b, and 4), identify an even number among odd numbers (experiment 2), and identify a coloured letter among black letters (experiment 3)). Surprise trials required the participant to recall the target attribute and a task irrelevant attribute (for example, to recall colour when the target attribute was identity). Participants selected the attribute in question among distractors by using forced-choice arrays. Failure to recall the target attribute would suggest that although the participant had been aware of the target attribute, they could not remember it. This is attribute amnesia.
Most experiments that aim to investigate the various mechanisms that contribute to attribute amnesia follow the format of the above experiment with various changes being made to observe different aspects of the phenomena. Experiments generally expand on the above experiment by including a pre-surprise phase and a surprise stage, it is the content of these stages that is manipulated to answer various research questions.
Lack of Memory Consolidation for Attended Information[edit]
In a paper by Hui Chen and Brad Wyble, the underlying cause of attribute amnesia was investigated. The experiment was similar to the first experiment mentioned above. The experiment makes it clear that there is a difference between encoding and consolidation. Participants clearly encoded information about object attributes since they were able to complete the pre-surprise phase. It is consolidation, the ability to retain that information for later retrieval that if lacking, appears to result in the failure to create a durable memory. The research was conducted over five experiments (Experiment 1, experiment 2, experiments 3a, 3b, 3c) using the same participants. Attribute amnesia continued to occur in experiment 1. Participants were asked to report an attribute of a target that was not the attribute queried in the surprise phase. This dismissed the possibility that the occurrence of attribute amnesia in previous studies was directly related to the use of a location report task in the pre-surprise phases. Attribute amnesia continued to occur in experiment 2 when the number of target stimuli were increased to prevent repetition of target stimuli across all trials in the experiment. This eliminated the possibility that attribute amnesia occurred when stimuli were highly familiar (due to repeated appearances during the experiment). The possibility that such familiarity would make selecting a target in a forced-choice test more difficult due to equal familiarity between target and distractor was eliminated. In experiment 3a the effect of attribute amnesia was largely attenuated after participants were forced to store and hold information about an attribute, in this case colour (that they will be asked to identify) in their memory for a brief amount of time. This continued to be replicated in experiment 3b where stimulus exposure difference was eliminated. Like experiment 3a, experiment 3c also required participants to identify colour. Instead of forcing participants to hold this information in their memory, a fixation cross was displayed that was the colour that the participants would have to match to a letter to pick it out. This process does not require a memory of the colour to be consolidated as the fixation cross supplies a direct reference. This resulted in the reoccurrence of attribute amnesia. Experiments 3a and 3c were compared and showed that attribute amnesia occurred only when memory consolidation did not occur, suggesting that memory consolidation is needed for participants to recall the attribute, even if it has been encoded moments beforehand.
The results concluded that a perceptually encoded attribute could be used to make a decision (such as select a target), without requiring memory consolidation if the decision was made immediately. Any delay in using this information, again, required memory consolidation for it to be called upon again at a later time, even if the amount of time between encoding and recollection was short. This did not apply for memory of location which remained reportable regardless of the task. The conclusion was that attribute amnesia was probably the result of lack of memory consolidation. [4]
Reduction of Attribute Amnesia With Novel Stimuli[edit]
A study by Weijia Chen and Piers D.L. Howe suggested that attribute amnesia is reduced when distractor items are novel during the pre-surprise trials of experiments with similar designs to the experiments listed above.
In all experiments participants were presented with the stimuli array for 150ms. This was replaced by a mask for 100ms, followed by a blank screen for 400ms. For the first 155 trials a task-irrelevant question appeared on the screen. For experiment 1, participants responded by pressing numbers 5-8 on a keyboard to indicate which of four named animals was a mammal. For experiments 2-4, participants responded with numbers 5-8 to indicate which of four named places was a city. Four numbers were then shown at the location of the placeholders and participants were asked to press the number key that corresponded to the location of the target (for experiment 1, a coloured letter, for experiments 2-4, an image of an animal). On the 156th trial an unexpected display of four coloured discs for experiment 1, or four animals for experiments 2-4 replaced the filler task. The images were accompanied with corresponding numbers (5-8). Participants were required to press the number that corresponded to the target identity and then identify the location of the target in the same way as the pre-surprise trials. Participants then received four more post-surprise trials that were identical to the surprise trial. Attribute amnesia was experienced in experiments 1 and 2 only. Experiments 3 and 4 used a novel animal image as the target. During the surprise trial, participants were good at identifying the target (that they had just seen) amongst unfamiliar distractor images. Experiment 2 worked in the same way with the exception of the number of animal images used. Only four animal images were used throughout the 155 pre-surprise trials so participants became highly familiar with them. In the surprise trial of experiment 2, participants had trouble picking out the target amongst familiar distractors. This also occurred in experiment 1 so the result is not restricted to one category of target stimuli. The study concluded that when distractor items are novel in the pre-surprise trials, attribute amnesia is reduced. [5]
Influencing Factors[edit]
Awareness[edit]
The key point made in the attribute amnesia hypothesis is that participants were unable to report attributes of a stimulus that they were made consciously aware of seconds beforehand. Many studies that have focused on the failure to report change or notice attributes of presented stimuli, attribute this failure to the lack of awareness of the change or attribute. The focus is often on the fact that the participant is not consciously aware of something so they do not react to it or recall its attributes. Attribute amnesia emphasizes the fact that a stimulus attribute has been consciously attended to by an individual and this does not necessarily lead to the ability to recall the attributes of the stimulus almost immediately afterward.
Expectation[edit]
Research by Chen and Wyble showed that what a person expects that they will have to report influences what they are able to report. Participants in their experiment were unable to report features that had reached awareness prior to being tested when they were not previously made aware that they would have to report those features. Participants were able to report these features once they expected that they would be required to do so.
Implications[edit]
Inattentional Blindness[edit]
Attribute amnesia suggests that an attribute of a stimulus can be consciously attended to and become unavailable for recollection immediately after. This implies that inattentional blindness might not always reflect failure of conscious perception. It is possible that a stimulus was attended to and that directing attention toward that stimulus was not sufficient to make it available for recollection.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Chen & Wyble (2015) Chen H, Wyble B. Amnesia for object attributes failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness. Psychological Science. 2015;26(2):203–210. doi: 10.1177/0956797614560648.
- ↑ Moore, C. M., & Egeth, H. (1997). Perception without atten- tion: Evidence of grouping under conditions of inattention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 339–352.
- ↑ Wolfe, J. M. (1999). Inattentional amnesia. In V. Coltheart (Ed.), Fleeting memories: Cognition of brief visual stimuli (pp. 71–94). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chen, H., & Wyble, B. (2016). Attribute amnesia reflects a lack of memory consolidation for attended information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42(2), 225-234. doi:10.1037/xhp0000133
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chen, W., & Howe, P. D. L. (2017). Attribute amnesia is greatly reduced with novel stimuli. PeerJ, 5, e4016. http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4016
- ↑ Jiang, Y. V., Shupe, J. M., Swallow, K. M., & Tan, D. H. (2016). Memory for recently accessed visual attributes. Journal of Experimental Psychol- ogy: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 1331–1337. http://dx.doi .org/10.1037/xlm0000231
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