Remembering More Than You Can Say: Re-examining “Amnesia” of Attended Attributes

Attribute amnesia (AA) describes a phenomenon whereby observers fail a surprise memory test which asks them to report an attribute they had just attended and used to fulfil a task goal. This finding has cast doubt on the prominent theory that attention results in encoding into working memory (WM), to which two competing explanations have been proposed: (1) task demands dictate whether attended information is encoded into WM, and (2) attended information is encoded in a weak state that does not survive the demands of the surprise memory test. To address this debate our study circumvented the limitations of a surprise memory test by embedding a second search task within a typical color-based AA search task. The search task was modified so that the attended attribute would reappear in the second search as either the target, a distractor, or not at all. Critically, our results support encoding of the attended attribute in WM though to a weaker extent than the attribute that is required for report. A second experiment confirmed that WM encoding only occurs for the attended attribute, though distractor attributes produce a bias consistent with negative priming. Our data provide novel support for a theory of memory consolidation that links the strength of a memory’s representation with expectations for how it will be used in a task. Implications for the utility of this procedure in future investigations previously limited by single trial data (i.e., surprise question methodology) are discussed.