Secure human attachment can promote support for climate change mitigation.

Attachment theory is an ethological approach to the development of durable, affective ties between humans. We propose that secure attachment is crucial for understanding climate change mitigation, because the latter is inherently a communal phenomenon resulting from joint action and requiring collective behavioral change. Here, we show that priming attachment security increases acceptance (Study 1: n = 173) and perceived responsibility toward anthropogenic climate change (Study 2: n = 209) via increased empathy for others. Next, we demonstrate that priming attachment security, compared to a standard National Geographic video about climate change, increases monetary donations to a proenvironmental group in politically moderate and conservative individuals (Study 3: n = 196). Finally, through a preregistered field study conducted in the United Arab Emirates (Study 4: n = 143,558 food transactions), we show that, compared to a message related to carbon emissions, an attachment security-based message is associated with a reduction in food waste. Taken together, our work suggests that an avenue to promote climate change mitigation could be grounded in core ethological mechanisms associated with secure attachment.

Meaningful objects avoid attribute amnesia due to incidental long-term memories.

Attribute amnesia describes the failure to unexpectedly report the attribute of an attended stimulus, likely reflecting a lack of working memory consolidation. Previous studies have shown that unique meaningful objects are immune to attribute amnesia. However, these studies used highly dissimilar foils to test memory, raising the possibility that good performance at the surprise test was based on an imprecise (gist-like) form of long-term memory. In Experiment 1, we explored whether a more sensitive memory test would reveal attribute amnesia in meaningful objects. We used a four-alternative-forced-choice test with foils having mis-matched exemplar (e.g., apple pie/pumpkin pie) and/or state (e.g., cut/full) information. Errors indicated intact exemplar, but not state information. Thus, meaningful objects are vulnerable to attribute amnesia under the right conditions. In Experiments 2A-2D, we manipulated the familiarity signals of test items by introducing a critical object as a pre-surprise target. In the surprise trial, this critical item matched one of the foil choices. Participants selected the critical object more often than other items. By demonstrating that familiarity influences responses in this paradigm, we suggest that meaningful objects are not immune to attribute amnesia but instead side-step the effects of attribute amnesia.

Training modulates memory-driven capture.

Attention is captured by information matching the contents of working memory. Though many factors modulate the amount of capture, there is surprising resistance to cognitive control. Capture occurs even when participants are instructed either that an item would never be a target or to drop that item from memory. Does the persistence of capture under these conditions reflect a rigidity in capture, or can properly motivated participants learn to completely suppress distractors and/or completely drop items from memory? Surprisingly, no studies have looked at the influence of extensive training of involuntary capture from working memory items. Here, we addressed whether training leads to a reduction or even elimination of memory-driven capture. After memorizing a single object, participants were cued to remember or to forget this object. Subsequently, they were asked to execute a search task. To measure capture, we compared search performances in displays that did and did not contain a distractor matching the earlier memorized object. Participants completed multiple experimental sessions over four days. The results showed that attentional capture by to-be-remembered distractors was reduced, but not eliminated in subsequent sessions compared with the first session. Training did not impact capture by to-be-forgotten objects. The results suggest observable, but limited, cognitive control over memory-driven capture.

The road to long-term memory: Top-down attention is more effective than bottom-up attention for forming long-term memories.

Does the strength of representations in long-term memory (LTM) depend on which type of attention is engaged? We tested participants' memory for objects seen during visual search. We compared implicit memory for two types of objects-related-context nontargets that grabbed attention because they matched the target defining feature (i.e., color; top-down attention) and salient distractors that captured attention only because they were perceptually distracting (bottom-up attention). In Experiment 1, the salient distractor flickered, while in Experiment 2, the luminance of the salient distractor was alternated. Critically, salient and related-context nontargets produced equivalent attentional capture, yet related-context nontargets were remembered far better than salient distractors (and salient distractors were not remembered better than unrelated distractors). These results suggest that LTM depends not only on the amount of attention but also on the type of attention. Specifically, top-down attention is more effective in promoting the formation of memory traces than bottom-up attention.

Selection in working memory is resource-demanding: Concurrent task effects on the retro-cue effect.

In a retro-cue paradigm, after memorizing a set of objects, people are cued to remember only a subset. Improved memory from the retro-cue suggests that selection processes can benefit items stored in working memory. Does selection in working memory require attention? If so, an attention-demanding task should disrupt retro-cue effects. Studies using a dual-task paradigm have found mixed results, with only one study (Janczyk & Berryhill, Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 76 (3), 715-724, 2014) showing a decreased retro-cue effect by a secondary task. Here we explore a potential issue in that study - the temporal overlap of the secondary task response with the memory test presentation. This raises questions about whether the secondary task was impairing selection processes in memory or was impacting the memory response. We replicated their paradigm by inserting a tone discrimination task at the retro-cue offset, but we also included a condition in which the tone task and the memory test were temporally separated. In Experiment 1, performing the tone task did not impair the retro-cue effect. In Experiment 2, we added an articulatory suppression task as in Janczyk and Berryhill's study, and we found that the requirement to execute the tone task impaired retro-cue effects. This impairment was independent of whether the tone and memory tasks overlapped. These findings suggest that internal prioritization can be impaired by dual-task interference, but may only occur when such interference is robust enough, for example, due to switching between multiple tasks.

Lives versus Livelihoods? Perceived economic risk has a stronger association with support for COVID-19 preventive measures than perceived health risk.

This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N = 25,435). The main predictors were (1) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (2) perceived risk to suffer economic losses due to coronavirus, and (3) their interaction effect. Individual and country-level variables were added as covariates in multilevel regression models. We examined compliance with various preventive health behaviors and support for strict containment policies. Results show that perceived economic risk consistently predicted mitigation behavior and policy support-and its effects were positive. Perceived health risk had mixed effects. Only two significant interactions between health and economic risk were identified-both positive.

Memory-driven capture occurs for individual features of an object.

Items held in working memory (WM) capture attention (memory-driven capture). People can selectively prioritize specific object features in WM. Here, we examined whether feature-specific prioritization within WM modulates memory-driven capture. In Experiment 1, after remembering the color and orientation of a triangle, participants were instructed, via retro-cue, whether the color, the orientation, or both features were relevant. To measure capture, we asked participants to execute a subsequent search task, and we compared performance in displays that did and did not contain the memory-matching feature. Color attracted attention only when it was relevant. No capture by orientation was found. In Experiment 2, we presented the retro-cue at one of the four locations of the search display to direct attention to specific objects. We found capture by color and this capture was larger when it was indicated as relevant. Crucially, orientation also attracted attention, but only when it was relevant. These findings provide evidence for reciprocal interaction between internal prioritization and external attention on the features level. Specifically, internal feature-specific prioritization modulates memory-driven capture but this capture also depends on the salience of the features.

Forget Me if You Can: Attentional capture by to-Be-remembered and to-Be-forgotten visual stimuli.

Previous studies on directed forgetting in visual working memory (VWM) have shown that, if people are cued to remember only a subset of the items currently held in VWM, they will completely forget the uncued, no longer relevant items. While this finding is indicative of selective remembering, it remains unclear whether directed forgetting can also occur in the absence of any concurrent to-be-remembered information. In the current study, we addressed this matter by asking participants to memorize a single object that could be followed by a cue to forget or remember this object. Following the cue, we assessed the object's activation in VWM by determining whether a matching distractor would capture attention in a visual search task. The results showed that, compared to a cue to remember, a cue to forget led to a reduced likelihood of attentional capture by a matching distractor. In addition, we found that capture effects by to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten distractors remained stable as the interval between the onset of the cue and the search task increased from 700 ms to 3900 ms. We conclude that, in the absence of any to-be-remembered objects, an instruction to forget an object held in WM leads to a rapid but incomplete deactivation of the representation of that object, thus allowing it to continue to produce a weak biasing effect on attentional selection for several seconds after the instruction to forget.

Memory-driven attentional capture reveals the waxing and waning of working memory activation due to dual-task interference.

Previous studies have shown that information held in working memory (WM) actively or as a residue of previous processing can lead to attentional capture by corresponding stimuli in the environment. Here, we compared attentional capture by goal-driven and residual WM activation and examined how these effects are affected by dual-task interference. In two experiments, participants performed an animacy judgment task for a word that they did or did not have to remember for a later recognition test. The word was followed in half of the trials by an arithmetic task that served to disrupt the WM activation of the previously processed word. Subsequently, WM-driven capture was assessed by having participants perform a single-target rapid serial visual presentation task in which a line drawing corresponding to the word was presented shortly before a target. The results showed that the line drawing captured attention irrespective of the presence of the arithmetic task when the word had to be remembered. In comparison, the animacy judgment alone resulted in capture only when the arithmetic task was absent, and this effect was equally strong as the capture effect caused by a to-be-remembered word. Taken together, these findings show that although residual and goal-driven WM activation may be equally potent in guiding attentional selection, these two forms of WM activation differ in that residual activation is overwritten by an attention-demanding task, whereas goal-driven WM activation can lead to the reinstatement of a stimulus after performing such a task.

The role of depth of encoding in attentional capture.

The aim of the current study was to examine whether depth of encoding influences attentional capture by recently attended objects. In Experiment 1, participants first had to judge whether a word referred to a living or a nonliving thing (deep encoding condition) or whether the word was written in lower- or uppercase (shallow encoding condition), and they then had to identify a digit displayed midway in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of 8 pictures. A picture corresponding to the previously processed word was presented either before or after the target digit. The results showed that this picture captured attention, thus resulting in an attentional blink for identification of a target digit, in the deep encoding condition but not in the shallow encoding condition. In Experiment 2, this capture effect was found to be abolished when an additional working-memory (WM) task was performed directly after the word-judgment task, suggesting that the capture effect stemmed from residual WM activation that could be erased by means of a secondary WM task. Taken together, these results suggest that deep and shallow encoding result in different degrees of WM activation, which in turn influences the likelihood of memory-driven attentional capture.