The attentional boost effect of memory across modalities (2013)

Undergraduate: Allison O'Toole

Faculty Advisor: Neil Mulligan
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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The attentional boost effect (ABE) refers to a phenomenon in which the usual inhibitory effects of divided attention are overcome and the participants in the divided attention (DA) conditions perform just as well on tests of memory as the participants in full attention (FA) conditions on explicit tests of memory. This effect occurs when the participants in the divided attention condition are required to monitor a distracter item and respond to its change. The perceptual encoding hypothesis states that this enhancement in memory is due to an increase in perceptual processing during encoding due to the nature of the distracter task (Swallow and Jiang, 2010, 2011, 2012). This study uses visual linguistic items at encoding; Experiment 1 used a modality manipulation and a recognition test while Experiment 2 used a free recall test. The results of the two experiments are inconsistent with the perceptual encoding hypothesis and suggest that perceptual encoding does not fully account for the appearance of the ABE. Although this study suggests that the underlying cognitive processes associated with the ABE are not completely controlled by perceptual processes, thus far only visual items have been used at encoding. Further research should include a modality manipulation at encoding to further assess the modality match effect in the ABE.