Selective attention and recognition: effects of congruency on episodic learning

Rosner, Tamara M; Maria C. D’Angelo; MacLellan, Ellen; Milliken, Bruce · 2014 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1007/s00426-014-0572-6

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Summary

This study investigates whether the cognitive control demands inherent in selective attention tasks influence episodic learning, specifically examining if items requiring greater attentional effort are better remembered. While previous research has established that conflict in tasks like the Stroop or flanker tasks leads to incremental behavioral adaptations, it remained unclear if such conflict enhances explicit episodic memory for specific instances. The authors hypothesized that incongruent trials, which demand higher cognitive control, would be encoded more strongly than congruent trials, resulting in superior recognition memory. To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments using a modified Stroop-like paradigm. In the study phase, participants read aloud a red target word interleaved with a green distractor word. Half of the trials were congruent (target and distractor words were identical), and half were incongruent (words were different). Crucially, each word appeared only once, ensuring that any memory differences reflected episodic encoding rather than repeated exposure. Following a distractor task, participants completed a recognition memory test using a remember/know paradigm to distinguish between recollection (conscious retrieval of details) and familiarity (sense of prior exposure). The results demonstrated a "mirror effect" in recognition memory: participants exhibited better memory for incongruent items compared to congruent items in both experiments. During the study phase, participants responded significantly slower and made more errors on incongruent trials, confirming the increased cognitive demand. In Experiment 1, with full context reinstatement at test, the memory advantage for incongruent items was driven by differences in recollection. Experiment 2 manipulated context reinstatement, finding that while the overall memory advantage for incongruent items persisted, the underlying processes varied; differences in recollection were only observed when full context was reinstated. These findings suggest that the selective attention processes required to resolve conflict during encoding enhance episodic learning. The study supports the hypothesis that conflict acts as a mediator for instance-based learning, strengthening the binding of stimulus representations. This implies that cognitive control mechanisms do not merely facilitate immediate performance but also contribute to the formation of explicit memories, linking theories of cognitive control with models of episodic memory and automatization.

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• attention selective divided