DOES INCREASED CUE FAMILIARITY DRAW ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE SURROUNDING CONTEXT?

Abstract

Cognitive psychology research delineates attention into two domains: external attention, which targets environmental stimuli, and internal attention, which selects and modulates mental representations. The familiarity-flip-of-attention theory posits that a familiar external cue redirects attention inward toward memory retrieval. This shift inward toward retrieval should reduce encoding of the surrounding visual context. The present study investigated this hypothesis. To systematically manipulate cue familiarity, participants were presented with cues featuring varying degrees of detectable familiarity from graphemic feature overlap (High Overlap vs. Low Overlap vs. No Overlap) to previously studied words. Each cue was overlaid onto a unique background wallpaper that served as the surrounding environmental context. For this cue phase, half of the participants were assigned to an external/encoding orientation task (counting vowels in the cue), while the other half were assigned to an internal/retrieval orientation task (using the cue to try to retrieve a resemblant studied word from memory). Participants then completed a recognition test for the wallpapers that had accompanied each cue. The hypothesis that cue familiarity-detection redirects attention away from the external environment and encoding toward the internal world and retrieval was supported in that later wallpaper recognition was significantly lower in the High Overlap (high familiarity) cue condition than in the Low and No Overlap conditions. This reduced wallpaper encoding in the High Overlap condition was unaffected by the assigned attentional orientation (external vs. internal), suggesting that familiarity-detection may redirect attention inward toward retrieval and away from encoding automatically, irrespective of the top-down orientation in which one is engaged.