The role of alerting in the attentional boost effect

Fajie Huang; Guyang Lin; Yingfang Meng; Yuanyuan Lin; Siqi Zheng

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1075979

The role of alerting in the attentional boost effect

Front Psychol. 2023 Apr 6:14:1075979. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1075979. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Fajie Huang^{1

2}, Guyang Lin², Yingfang Meng², Yuanyuan Lin³, Siqi Zheng²

Affiliations

¹ School of Health, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, China.
² School of Psychology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China.
³ Education Research Institution of Fujian Province, Fuzhou, China.

Abstract

Stimuli presented simultaneously with behaviorally relevant events (e.g., targets) are better memorized, an unusual effect defined as the attentional boost effect (ABE). We hypothesized that all types of behaviorally relevant events, including attentional cues, can promote the encoding process for the stimuli paired with them, and the attentional alerting network can amplify the ABE. The two experiments we conducted demonstrated that not all behaviorally relevant events, including alerting cues, benefit the processing of concurrently paired stimuli. We also found that the presence of a cue prior to a target can extend the memory advantage produced by target detection, but this advantage can only be observed within a limited range of time. Overall, our study provides the first evidence that the alerting network plays an important role in the ABE.

Keywords: alerting; attentional boost; dual-task; memory; target detection.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Social Science Foundation of Fujian Province (No. FJ2022C027). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.