The development of memory selection: When children have better memory than adults

The development of cognitive selectivity focuses primarily on the ability of attentional selection. The current study explored the development of another critical but overlooked selective function—memory selection, by comparing the ability of filtering attended yet outdated information between young children and adults. By adopting a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking technology, Experiments 1-3 consistently showed a “developmental reversal”-like phenomenon that children outperformed adults in reporting the attended yet outdated information. Moreover, this was not caused by the different processing strategy (Experiment 2) or different deployment of attention (Experiment 3) between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed for young children, leading to their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory. This demonstration significantly deepens our understanding of the development of cognitive selectivity, and also has implications for understanding the development of cognitive inhibition and early learning

A new aspect of cognitive selectivity: Working memory reselection for attended information

The selective function of brain is classically characterized by attentional mechanism. The current study proposed a new cognitive selectivity—working memory (WM) reselection process that could be distinguished from attentional selection. The first section of the present study provided both behavioral and neuroscientific evidence showing that even fully attended information was not ever encoded into WM, indicating there exists a WM reselection process for attended information. More importantly, in the second section, the mechanism of WM reselection was explored and the surprising finding was that the reselection operated through a dimensional-memory-filter. That is, the brain could selectively encode the attended information from one feature dimension while blocking others from another dimension at the same time. However, once a feature is selected, all concurrently attended information from the same dimension would be automatically encoded into WM regardless of whether they are necessary for the task. These findings have critical implications for understanding the mechanisms of memory formation

The postdictive effect of choice reflects the modulation of attention on choice

Our conscious perception of the world is not an instantaneous, moment-by-moment construction. Rather, our perception of an event is influenced, over time, by information gained following the event: this is known as a postdictive effect. A recent study reported that this postdictive effect could occur even in choice. The present study sought to test whether the striking postdictive effect of choice reflects the modulation of attention on choice, by directly and systematically manipulating attention in two experiments. Specifically, Experiment 1 revealed that the robust postdictive effect of choice was almost completely eliminated when attentional bias was removed. More importantly, Experiment 2 demonstrated that the postdictive effect of choice could be modulated by directly manipulating participants’ attention with a spatial cue, in particular, when the cue appeared at short time delays. These results suggest that choice could be considerably postdictively influenced by attention and this effect was most pronounced within a short time window wherein decision-making was most likely in progress. The current study not only enables clarification of the mechanism of the newly discovered postdictive effect of choice, but also extends evidence of the modulation of attention on decision-making

Intentional commitment as a spontaneous presentation of self

Commitment is a defining feature of human rationality. This study explores a social origin of spontaneous intentional commitment, assuming commitment in individual decision-making arises from an internalized self-presentation, transferring the audience of commitment from a real partner to an inner eye perspective. To test this "social inner eye" hypothesis, we exposed participants to different social contexts while maintaining the individual nature of the task. Across three experiments, we found that (a) individuals consistently showed stronger commitment when acting in front of others, (b) different social contexts had different impacts on the process of commitment formation, with the mere outside observer accelerating commitment, while a parallel player delays it, (c) participants spontaneously coordinated their intentions to avoid conflicts when playing with another parallel player, despite no coordination was required. Taken together, we demonstrated how social context influences the strength, content, and timing of individual commitment. These findings align with the perspective that individual commitment has a social origin. They also contribute to an understanding of why commitment is universally valued across cultures and is seen as a virtue rather than a weakness in human decision-making

For the longer-term benefits: When non-target is preferentially selected in visual search.

Selective attention toward the target in visual search has been extensively studied, but little is known about the selection process and role of attention toward non-target. However, daily life scenes often contain a large number of interrelated items, and focusing on non-target is not only common but also helpful for locating the target. Here we explore this in three experiments in which participants searched for a target number among regularly or randomly arranged numbers. Results showed that human used the regularity of the search sequence to shorten the search time. Reaction time and eye movement data suggested that humans could narrow down the search space based on the selected non-target and the regularity, thereby increasing search speed. Further model simulations found that attention prioritized non-target location that was most helpful in narrowing the search space, rather than location where the target was most likely to present, especially when the search space contained a large number of items. Although the probability of finding the target immediately is reduced, the probability of locating the target next increases, thus the entire search process benefits. We generalize this attention selection mechanism as the informative searching hypothesis, which suggests that attention is guided to the item with the highest expected information gain. Such selection mechanism may be an important basis for resource-limited human beings to successfully interact with complex real-world

Whether and how choice decision can be postdictively influenced by attention?

Our conscious perception of the world is not an instantaneous moment-by-moment construction, but rather the information subsequent in time seems to affect the percept of the prior event, which was known as postdictive effect. A recent study reported this postdictive effect could even occur in choice decision. The present study sought to test whether the striking postdictive effect of choice reflects the modulation of attention on choice, by directly and systematically manipulating attention in two experiments. Specifically, Experiment 1 revealed that the robust postdictive effect of choice was almost completely eliminated when the attentional bias triggered by a sudden color change was removed. More importantly, Experiment 2 demonstrated that the postdictive effect of choice could be modulated by directly manipulating participants’ attention with a spatial cue, in particular when the cue appeared at short time delays (less than 500 ms). These findings suggest that choice decision could be considerably postdicted by attention and this effect was most pronounced within a short time window wherein the decision was most likely in progress

More attention with less working memory: The active inhibition of attended but outdated information

Attention has traditionally been regarded as a gateway to working memory, and almost all theoretical frameworks of attention and working memory assume that individuals always have a better memory for information that has received more attention. Here, we provide a series of counterintuitive demonstrations which show that paying more attention to a piece of information impedes, rather than enhances, the selection of this information into working memory. Experiments 1–5 provide converging evidence for an even weaker working memory trace of fully attended but outdated features, compared with baseline irrelevant features that were completely ignored. This indicates that the brain actively inhibits attended but outdated information to prevent it from entering working memory. Experiment 6 demonstrates that this inhibition processing is subject to executive control. These findings lead to a substantial reinterpretation of the relationship between attention and working memory