Exploring the roles of distinctiveness and performance anticipation in the Attentional Boost Effect

ABSTRACT

We tested the validity of two alternative accounts of the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) – the finding that words associated with to-be-responded targets are recognized better than words associated with to-be-ignored distractors. The distinctiveness hypothesis assumes that, during recognition, participants probe their memories for distinctive information confirming that a word was studied (e.g., “I remember having pressed the spacebar, so I must have studied the word”). This strategy cannot be used in a between-subjects condition in which participants cannot appreciate the differences between target – and distractor-paired words. In agreement, Experiments 1A and 1B found that the ABE was significant in a within-subjects design, whereas it was eliminated in a between-subjects design. On the other hand, the performance anticipation hypothesis assumes that, during the study phase, participants anticipate the need of responding to a subset of target-paired words: this would create a persistent performance anticipation that would prevent them from effectively encoding distractor-paired words. In contrast with this account, we found that, when blocks of five distractor trials were regularly alternated with blocks of five target trials in Experiment 2, recognition accuracy decreased linearly in both conditions. Overall, these results suggest that distinctiveness, but not performance anticipation, might underlie the ABE.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional boost effect
• distinctiveness
• performance anticipation
• recognition memory
• dual-task interaction model

Data availability statement

Raw data are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The mean age of the students enrolled in Universitas Mercatorum (a telematic university) is quite high, explaining why the age of our participants was higher than that of the samples typically recruited in public universities.

2 The Welch correction was applied to the degrees of freedom of t-tests, whenever the equal variance assumption was violated.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.