Encoding-phase orientation toward thematic content over perceptual style benefits picture memory

ABSTRACT

Orienting toward the meaning versus perceptual features of an experience benefits subsequent memory. Yet given that past work encouraged these orientations with different tasks, it is not clear if this memory benefit is solely due to internal processing factors versus external task-related ones. Moreover, it remains unclear how this benefit generalises from verbal to detailed picture memory. Here, we developed a novel paradigm that cued participants’ attention to thematic (story) or stylistic (artist style) dimensions of storybook-style illustrations during a repeat-detection task. Afterwards, participants completed a recognition memory test with studied illustrations and lures along thematic and stylistic dimensions. In contrast to past work, both orienting tasks were identical except for the dimension participants were cued to attend to. Furthermore, our thematic and stylistic dimensions enabled us to separately examine memory quality along each dimension. We found that thematic attention yielded superior memory for studied illustrations over stylistic orientations. False alarms to lures varied by dimension and attention: errors were greater to thematic than stylistic lures overall and stylistic attention elevated false alarms to stylistic lures. Our results show that semantic encoding orientations enhance detailed picture memory, without a cost to memory quality along semantic or perceptual dimensions of experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• recognition memory
• false recognition
• levels of processing

Acknowledgments

We thank A. Chun for assistance with data collection and M.L. Mack, A. Blumenthal, A.S. Finn, A.C.H. Lee, M. Moscovitch, and members of the Budding Minds lab for helpful discussions. Portions of these data were presented as a poster at the 42nd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and included in the conference proceedings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant [RGPIN-2018-04933] and supplements [COVDI-2020-06306; DGECR-2018-00252], Canada Foundation for Innovation [JELF; 36876], Ontario Research Fund, and University of Toronto startup funds to MLS; and NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship – Doctoral (PGS D) program, NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s (CGS M) program, and Ontario Graduate Scholarship to SV.