Diffusion Decision Modeling of Retrieval Following the Temporal Selection of Behaviorally Relevant Moments

When targets appear in a detection task, unrelated but concurrent stimuli benefit from an encoding enhancement (the attentional boost effect). For instance, visual scenes paired with target cues (e.g., female, but not male, faces) are subsequently better recognized than those paired with distractors. Recent work suggests that this also benefits incidental relational memory for all features of the visual display, such as which cue appeared with a given scene, and not just the scene itself. However, it remains unclear whether this can be accounted for by response bias or uninstructed memorization of those concurrent items. This study used diffusion decision modeling to investigate the contributions of evidence accumulation rates (indicative of richer or more easily accessed representations) and response bias to recognition memory. Furthermore, two new experiments investigated the effects of intentionality during encoding. Across all five experiments, target-paired information was subsequently recognized with a higher drift rate than distractor-paired information. While there was evidence of response bias in some cases, keeping bias fixed produced better model fits. Moreover, the new experiments replicated earlier findings, extended them to spatial features, and demonstrated that instructing participants to divide attention across three aspects of a trial (scene, face gender, and face identity) rather than two (scene and face gender) increased, rather than reduced, the magnitude of the attentional boost effect for both the background scenes and relational memory. This study strengthens the claim that temporal selection boosts intentional and incidental encoding of the relationships between co-occurring stimuli.