The influence of visual tasks on short and long-term memory for visual features
was investigated using a change-detection paradigm. Subjects completed 2 tasks:
(a) describing objects in natural images, reporting a specific property of each
object when a crosshair appeared above it, and (b) viewing a modified version of
each scene, and detecting which of the previously described objects had changed.
When tested over short delays (seconds), no task effects were found. Over longer
delays (minutes) we found the describing task influenced what types of changes
were detected in a variety of explicit and incidental memory experiments.
Furthermore, we found surprisingly high performance in the incidental memory
experiment, suggesting that simple tasks are sufficient to instill long-lasting
visual memories