Attentional focusing, mind wandering and memory in a complex environment

Dividing attention during the encoding process is associated with a decrease in episodic memory performance (Naveh-Benjamin & Brubaker, 2019; Uncapher & Rugg, 2005). An episode of mind wandering, defined as “task-unrelated and stimulus-independent thoughts” (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), is associated with a perceptual decoupling akin to a division of attention. Thus, this phenomenon can also impair episodic memory performance (for a review, see Blondé et al., 2022). In a previous study investigating to which extent attentional variation during encoding in a virtual reality environment can predict episodic memory performance, surprising results were reported (Blondé et al., 2021). We found a quadratic reversed U-shaped relationship between the probability of giving a response based on recollection and the score of mind wandering. This means that if the participants had a high score of mind wandering, the probability that they would answer "I know" (the familiarity-based response) was high. Surprisingly, if the participants were fully focusing on the environment and had a low score of mind wandering, the probability of giving a familiarity-based response was also high. However, when the participants were neither fully focused on the task nor their thoughts (intermediate level of mental wandering), the probability that they answered, "I remember" (the recollection-based response) was the highest. These results diverge from the previously described pattern showing a negative linear relationship between mind wandering and recollection-based retrieval. One explanation could be that, on the one hand, when a high level of mind wandering is experienced, it creates a decoupled state of attention hindering the encoding of any items (attended or not). On the other hand, when mind wandering is low, it may be associated with a narrowing of the attentional focus on some attended feature of the scene, which will be better encoded at the expense of the unattended information (e.g., the context). Nevertheless, as this experiment was conducted in a complex environment, and there was no specific task that forced the participant to process the critical items, it is difficult to establish the focus of participants’ attention. Thus, we conducted another experiment to test this hypothesis in a more controlled setting (Blondé et al., in prep) in which the critical items were words encoded during an incidental task. However, the recognition response pattern showed that participants did not distinguish unattended items from the distractors, suggesting that unattended items did not receive any processing during encoding. The purpose of this experiment is thus to test our previous hypotheses with the use of pictures to figure a more complex environment. The use of visual stimuli will allow us to use an eye-tracker during the encoding task to measure fixation times for both attended and unattended stimuli in order to have an implicit assessment of attention received during encoding.