Abstract

CAVAZOS, David Charles  and  CANSINO, Selene. The effects of endogenous and exogenus orienting of attention on source memory. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2018, vol.8, n.2, pp.80-89. ISSN 2007-4719.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fpsi.20074719e.2018.2.07.

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention on episodic memory. Thirty healthy participants performed a cueing attention paradigm during encoding, in which images of common objects were presented either to the left or to the right of the center of the screen. Before the presentation of each image, three types of symbolic cues were displayed to indicate the location in which the stimuli would appear: valid cues to elicit endogenous orientation, invalid cues to prompt exogenous orientation and neutral or uncued trials. The participants’ task was to discriminate whether the images were symmetrical or not while fixating on the center of the screen to assure the manifestation of only covert attention mechanisms. Covert attention refers to the ability to orient attention by means of central control mechanisms alone, without head and eye movements. Trials with eye movements were excluded after inspection of eye-tracker recordings that were conducted throughout the task. During retrieval, participants conducted a source memory task in which they indicated the location where the images were presented during encoding. Memory for spatial context was superior during endogenous orientation than during exogenous orientation, whereas exogenous orientation was associated with a greater number of missed responses compared to the neutral trials. The formation of episodic memory representations with contextual details benefits from endogenous attention.

Keywords : Top-down attention; Bottom-up attention; Symbolic cue; Eye movements; Episodic memory.