Attentional Boost Effect

The study is exploring attentional boost effect (ABE) and its relationship with the perceptual degradation effect (PDE). ABE is a phenomenon where stimuli is remembered more effectively with an unrelated target during a detection task compared to distractors. PDE is the finding that recognition performance is better for perceptually degraded words. This experiment’s purpose is to explore the relationship between these effects. Specifically, the study will look into whether ABE may use the same attentional processes as PDE.
The participant sits in front of the computer screen where he or she is asked to read clear and blurry words, while simultaneously pressing the spacebar when two yellow dots were with the word. When shown a red square, participants have to quickly press the space bar. Next, participants were given an arithmetic task. For the final part of the experiment the participants completed a recognition test where participants specifically identified if they remembered the source of the recognition or if it was just familiarity. The independent variables of the experiment are the target versus non-targets and the clear versus blurry words
Several experiments were done with both visual and auditory stimuli, while adjusting word frequency. Results showed that ABE was greater with higher frequency words. ABE may have lesser effects on low frequency words because attention is already heightened when encoding low frequency words. The researchers hypothesized that ABE and word frequency may both take part in strengthening contextual encoding. The current study mentions that the attentional processes used in PDE may be the same as those used in word frequency effects as well as ABE. This interconnection strengthens the study as more factors are accounted for when examining the results and this can also improve ecological