THE ATTENTIONAL BOOST EFFECT AND LEVELS OF PROCESSING

Abstract

The attentional boost effect (ABE) is the enhanced encoding for items that are paired with targets than with distractors (Swallow & Jiang, 2010). Past studies used perceptual properties such as colour for target detection tasks. The present study aims to explore whether target detection that is oriented towards conceptual properties, specifically word concreteness, will affect the ABE. This is because the ABE is postulated to coincide with early phases of processing (Mulligan & Spataro, 2015) thus, we aim to investigate if this claim is indeed true. The present study was a mixed-design study with three conditions: full attention, divide attention with a colour detection task, and divided attention with a concreteness detection task. The dependent variable was recognition memory performance. The results show that the nature of target detection task did not affect ABE and neither did targets of varying concreteness suggesting that ABE is not dependent on early phases of processing in target detection tasks.