Memory's grip on attention: The influence of item memory on the allocation of attention

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the capture of attention to physically and emotionally salient events in the environment. Much less is known, however, about the influence of memory on the allocation of attention, both in terms of the attraction towards a previously seen item and the holding of attention on that item. In the present study, participants viewed scenes while eyetracking was used to explore whether item memory influences the allocation of attention. The results revealed that “old items” (presented in an earlier encoding phase) were fixated sooner and held attention longer (as indexed by more and longer duration fixations) than novel comparison items. These results did not differ between participants given different task instructions or between participants reporting different intended strategies, suggesting the effects on attentional allocation were unintentional. These results provide evidence that item memory affects the allocation of attention, influencing both the guidance of attention and subsequent dwell time.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NIMH grant R01 MH66034 to JBH. We are grateful to Edward Moss and Kevin Denny for assistance with data collection and analyses, and to Steve Most and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

¹Although participants were not explicitly instructed to remain fixated on the fixation point during the 3000 ms ISI interval, the initial eye position of participants at the onset of each scene was within one degree of visual angle of the fixation point on 90.7% of the trials.

²In a recent study of contextual cueing, Peterson and Kramer (2001) replicated the finding that the detection of a target was significantly faster for previously viewed visual search displays, but showed that the target was rarely the first item fixated. The authors argued that recognition of the scene context does not always occur immediately upon the onset of the scene, and suggested that contextual cueing is a different form of attentional guidance than is the rapid and automatic orienting triggered by abruptly appearing objects.