Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence for attentional up-regulation, but not down-regulation, when encoding pictures into long-term memory

Visual long-term memory allows us to store a virtually infinite amount of visual information (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(38), 14325–14329, 2008; Standing in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 25(2), 207–222, 1973). However, our ability to encode new visual information fluctuates from moment to moment. In Experiment 1, we tested the hypothesis that we have voluntary control over these periodic fluctuations in our ability to encode representations into visual long-term memory using a precueing paradigm combined with behavioral and electrophysiological indices of memory encoding. We found that visual memory encoding can be up-regulated, but it was much more difficult, if not impossible, to down-regulate encoding on a trial-by-trial basis. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that voluntary up-regulation of visual memory encoding for an item incurs a cost to memory encoding of other items by manipulating the cueing probability. Here, we found that, although the cueing benefit was constant for both low (20%) and high (50%) cueing probabilities, the benefit in the high cueing probability condition came with the overall impairment of memory encoding. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that top-down control of visual long-term memory encoding may be primarily to prioritize certain memories, but this prioritization has a cost and should not be overused to avoid its negative consequences.