The relationship between attention and memory has attracted a great deal of research since the earliest days of cognitive psychology. Classic studies investigating the effects of selective and divided attention manipulations revealed that unattended stimuli were unlikely to be remembered and that asking participants to perform a secondary task during the encoding phase (but not during the retrieval phase) had a detrimental effect on their ability to recall (or recognize) studied items. At the same time, neuropsychologists began to illustrate that even people with amnesia can show evidence of memory if tested with implicit tasks (i.e., tasks in which incidentally learned information alters performance without the involvement of conscious recollection processes). These findings suggested that some forms of memory are less dependent on attention resources than others and that the relation between attention and memory is not a simple one.
While these early studies have primarily looked at the overall effects of selective and divided attention on explicit and implicit memory, more recent investigations have focused on the temporal dynamic underlying the relationship between the primary and secondary tasks. Taken together, these studies converged in demonstrating that, under specific conditions, divided attention can have positive effects on memory. Variously referred to as the “attentional boost effect”, “fast task-irrelevant perceptual learning”, “motor-induced memory enhancement”, and the “cue approach training effect”, the common finding is that detecting and responding to a target stimulus in the secondary task produces a broad attentional enhancement that benefits the encoding of concurrently presented materials. Although substantial research has accumulated in this field in the last decade, we are still far from having a clear understanding of the theoretical and neural mechanisms that drive these counterintuitive effects. Therefore, the aim of this Research Topic is to provide a forum in which leading experts can present their latest findings and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of their findings from different perspectives.
We are interested in receiving original research articles, registered reports, reviews and general commentaries addressing the complex interactions between attention and memory in healthy and clinical populations. Although our primary interest concerns the positive effects that secondary tasks exert on long- and short-term memory, we will also consider studies providing new insights on the more classic negative effects of divided attention manipulations. Articles addressing the neural bases of these effects are also welcome.
The relationship between attention and memory has attracted a great deal of research since the earliest days of cognitive psychology. Classic studies investigating the effects of selective and divided attention manipulations revealed that unattended stimuli were unlikely to be remembered and that asking participants to perform a secondary task during the encoding phase (but not during the retrieval phase) had a detrimental effect on their ability to recall (or recognize) studied items. At the same time, neuropsychologists began to illustrate that even people with amnesia can show evidence of memory if tested with implicit tasks (i.e., tasks in which incidentally learned information alters performance without the involvement of conscious recollection processes). These findings suggested that some forms of memory are less dependent on attention resources than others and that the relation between attention and memory is not a simple one.
While these early studies have primarily looked at the overall effects of selective and divided attention on explicit and implicit memory, more recent investigations have focused on the temporal dynamic underlying the relationship between the primary and secondary tasks. Taken together, these studies converged in demonstrating that, under specific conditions, divided attention can have positive effects on memory. Variously referred to as the “attentional boost effect”, “fast task-irrelevant perceptual learning”, “motor-induced memory enhancement”, and the “cue approach training effect”, the common finding is that detecting and responding to a target stimulus in the secondary task produces a broad attentional enhancement that benefits the encoding of concurrently presented materials. Although substantial research has accumulated in this field in the last decade, we are still far from having a clear understanding of the theoretical and neural mechanisms that drive these counterintuitive effects. Therefore, the aim of this Research Topic is to provide a forum in which leading experts can present their latest findings and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of their findings from different perspectives.
We are interested in receiving original research articles, registered reports, reviews and general commentaries addressing the complex interactions between attention and memory in healthy and clinical populations. Although our primary interest concerns the positive effects that secondary tasks exert on long- and short-term memory, we will also consider studies providing new insights on the more classic negative effects of divided attention manipulations. Articles addressing the neural bases of these effects are also welcome.
