Does familiarity-detection flip attention inward? The familiarity-flip-of-attention account of the primacy effect in memory for repetitions.

Abstract

In cognitive psychology, research on attention is shifting from focusing primarily on how people orient toward stimuli in the environment toward instead examining how people orient internally toward memory representations. With this new shift the question arises: What factors in the environment send attention inward? A recent proposal is that one factor is cue familiarity-detection (Cleary, Irving & Mills, Cognitive Science, 47, e13274, 2023). Within this theoretical framework, we reinterpret a decades-old empirical pattern-a primacy effect in memory for repetitions-in a novel way. The effect is the finding that altered repetitions of an image were remembered as re-occurrences of the first presentation despite having a changed left-right orientation; participants better retained the first orientation while incorrectly remembering changed instantiations as repetitions of the first orientation (DiGirolamo & Hintzman, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 121-124, 1997). We argue that this pattern, which has never been fully explained, is an existing empirical test of the newly proposed mechanism of cue familiarity-detection flipping attention inward toward memory. Specifically, an image's first appearance is novel so draws attention outward toward encoding the stimulus' attributes like orientation; subsequent mirror-reversed appearances are detected as familiar so flip attention inward toward memory search, which leads to 1) inattentional blindness for the changed orientation due to the familiarity-driven shift of attention inward and 2) memory retrieval of the first instance and its orientation, thereby enhancing memory for the first instance and its previously encoded attributes like orientation.