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Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli

Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it rem...

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Autores principales: Sasin, Edyta, Morey, Candice C., Nieuwenstein, Mark
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643359/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28074450
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1225-0
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author Sasin, Edyta
Morey, Candice C.
Nieuwenstein, Mark
author_facet Sasin, Edyta
Morey, Candice C.
Nieuwenstein, Mark
author_sort Sasin, Edyta
collection PubMed
description Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object’s activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten distractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget.
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spelling pubmed-56433592017-10-27 Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli Sasin, Edyta Morey, Candice C. Nieuwenstein, Mark Psychon Bull Rev Brief Report Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object’s activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten distractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget. Springer US 2017-01-10 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5643359/ /pubmed/28074450 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1225-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Brief Report
Sasin, Edyta
Morey, Candice C.
Nieuwenstein, Mark
Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title_full Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title_fullStr Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title_full_unstemmed Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title_short Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli
title_sort forget me if you can: attentional capture by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten visual stimuli
topic Brief Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643359/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28074450
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1225-0
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