skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: The power of one: A single flanker produces compatibility effects in the episodic flanker task
Abstract The episodic flanker task is an episodic version of the Eriksen and Eriksen (Perception & Psychophysics, 16(1), 143–149, 1974) perceptual flanker task, showing the same compatibility and distance effects. Subjects are presented with a list followed by a probe display in which one item is cued. The task, to indicate whether the probed letter appeared in the same position in the memory list, requires focusing attention on a single item in memory. The probe display contains flanking items to be ignored. They aresameas the memory list ordifferent.Sameflankers are compatible with “yes” responses and incompatible with “no” responses.Differentflankers are incompatible with “yes” responses and compatible with “no” responses. Previously, we presented multiple flankers in the probe, allowing a global matching strategy. Here, we report two episodic flanker experiments with just one flanker in the probe to encourage focusing sharply on the target. We found flanker compatibility effects in both experiments when a single flanker appeared immediately adjacent to the target. Experiment 2 varied the distance between the flanker and the target in the probe and the memory list and found the compatibility effect in response time only when the flanker was immediately adjacent to the target in both the probe and the memory list. The effect in accuracy also appeared when the flanker was two positions away in both the probe and the memory list. These results show that attention is focused sharply on elements of a memory structure during retrieval, suggesting that memory retrieval is perceptual attention turned inward.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2147017
PAR ID:
10609351
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Editor(s):
Parks, Coleen
Publisher / Repository:
Springer US
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Memory & Cognition
Edition / Version:
1
Volume:
online
Issue:
online
ISSN:
0090-502X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1-13
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Memory and attention flanker task selective attention spotlight model
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: 1.3MB Other: .pdf
Size(s):
1.3MB
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; (, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)
    Abstract We report 10 experiments exploring the proposition that memory retrieval is perceptual attention turned inward. The experiments adapt the Eriksen and Eriksen perceptual flanker effect to a memory task in which subjects must decide whether a cued item in a probe display appeared in the same position in a memory list. Previous research with thisepisodic flanker taskfound distance and compatibility effects like those in the perceptual flanker task, suggesting that the same attentional spotlight is turned inward in memory retrieval. The previous experiments used lists of six consonants. The experiments reported here were designed to generalize the results to a broader range of conditions, from letters to words, colors, and pictures, and from set size 6 to set sizes of 4 and 5. Experiments 1–4 varied distance and set size with lists of four, five, or six letters, words, colors, and pictures, respectively. The distance effect was observed with all materials and all set sizes. Experiments 5–8 varied compatibility by presenting context items in the probe that were either the same as the memory list (and therefore compatible with “yes” responses and incompatible with “no” responses) or different from the memory list (and therefore incompatible with “yes” responses and compatible with “no” responses). We found compatibility effects with all materials and all set sizes. These results support the proposition that memory retrieval is attention turned inward. Turned inward or outward, attention is a general process that applies the same computations to different kinds of materials. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; (, Learning & Behavior)
    Vivid episodic memories in humans have been described as the replay of the flow of past events in sequential order. Recently, Panoz-Brown et al. (2018) developed an olfactory memory task in which rats were presented with a list of trial-unique odors in an encoding context; next, in a distinctive memory assessment context, the rats were rewarded for choosing the second to last item from the list while avoiding other items from the list. In a different memory assessment context, the fourth to last item was rewarded. According to the episodic memory replay hypothesis, the rat remembers the list items and searches these items to find the item at the targeted locations in the list. However, events presented sequentially differ in memory trace strength, allowing a rat to use the relative familiarity of the memory traces, instead of episodic memory replay, to solve the task. Here, we directly manipulated memory trace strength by manipulating the odor intensity of target odors in both the list presentation and memory assessment. The rats relied on episodic memory replay to solve the memory assessment in conditions in which reliance on memory trace strength is ruled out. We conclude that rats are able to replay episodic memories. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; (, Scientific Reports)
    Abstract Selective attention improves sensory processing of relevant information but can also impact the quality of perception. For example, attention increases visual discrimination performance and at the same time boosts apparent stimulus contrast of attended relative to unattended stimuli. Can attention also lead to perceptual distortions of visual representations? Optimal tuning accounts of attention suggest that processing is biased towards “off-tuned” features to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of the target, especially when targets and distractors are confusable. Here, we tested whether such tuning gives rise to phenomenological changes of visual features. We instructed participants to select a color among other colors in a visual search display and subsequently asked them to judge the appearance of the target color in a 2-alternative forced choice task. Participants consistently judged the target color to appear more dissimilar from the distractor color in feature space. Critically, the magnitude of these perceptual biases varied systematically with the similarity between target and distractor colors during search, indicating that attentional tuning quickly adapts to current task demands. In control experiments we rule out possible non-attentional explanations such as color contrast or memory effects. Overall, our results demonstrate that selective attention warps the representational geometry of color space, resulting in profound perceptual changes across large swaths of feature space. Broadly, these results indicate that efficient attentional selection can come at a perceptual cost by distorting our sensory experience. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Developmental Science)
    Abstract Phonological processing skills have not only been shown to be important for reading skills, but also for arithmetic skills. Specifically, previous research in typically developing children has suggested that phonological processing skills may be more closely related to arithmetic problems that are solved through fact retrieval (e.g., remembering the solution from memory) than procedural computation (e.g., counting). However, the relationship between phonological processing and arithmetic in children with learning disabilities (LDs) has not been investigated. Yet, understanding these relationships in children with LDs is especially important because it can help elucidate the cognitive underpinnings of math difficulties, explain why reading and math disabilities frequently co‐occur, and provide information on which cognitive skills to target for interventions. In 63 children with LDs, we examined the relationship between different phonological processing skills (phonemic awareness, phonological memory, and rapid serial naming) and arithmetic. We distinguished between arithmetic problems that tend to be solved with fact retrieval versus procedural computation to determine whether phonological processing skills are differentially related to these two arithmetic processes. We found that phonemic awareness, but not phonological memory or rapid serial naming, was related to arithmetic fact retrieval. We also found no association between any phonological processing skills and procedural computation. These results converge with prior research in typically developing children and suggest that phonemic awareness is also related to arithmetic fact retrieval in children with LD. These results raise the possibility that phonemic awareness training might improve both reading and arithmetic fact retrieval skills. Research HighlightsRelationships between phonological processing and various arithmetic skills were investigated in children with learning disabilities (LDs) for the first time.We found phonemic awareness was related to arithmetic involving fact retrieval, but not to arithmetic involving procedural computation in LDs.The results suggest that phonemic awareness is not only important to skilled reading, but also to some aspects of arithmetic.These results raise the question of whether intervention in phonemic awareness might improve arithmetic fact retrieval skills. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; et al (, New Phytologist)
    Summary Plant responses to abiotic environmental challenges are known to have lasting effects on the plant beyond the initial stress exposure. Some of these lasting effects are transgenerational, affecting the next generation. The plant response to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels has been well studied. However, these investigations are typically limited to plants grown for a single generation in a high CO2environment while transgenerational studies are rare.We aimed to determine transgenerational growth responses in plants after exposure to high CO2by investigating the direct progeny when returned to baseline CO2levels.We found that both the flowering plantArabidopsis thalianaand seedless nonvascular plantPhyscomitrium patenscontinue to display accelerated growth rates in the progeny of plants exposed to high CO2. We used the model species Arabidopsis to dissect the molecular mechanism and found that DNA methylation pathways are necessary for heritability of this growth response.More specifically, the pathway of RNA‐directed DNA methylation is required to initiate methylation and the proteins CMT2 and CMT3 are needed for the transgenerational propagation of this DNA methylation to the progeny plants. Together, these two DNA methylation pathways establish and then maintain a cellular memory to high CO2exposure. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email