Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The way working memory, attention, and long-term memory interact is an important question given the role these cognitive systems play in many tasks. In this paper, we present a study examining prior counterintuitive results that show that prioritization of some stimuli aids learning but hurts performance at a delayed test. In this study, we use eye tracking to measure attention consistency, to examine the effect of prioritization and working memory load on recall accuracy. The goal was to assess two possible explanations of the negative effect of prioritization on a delayed test. Our results indicate that prioritization reduces response time and increases accuracy during learning of associations. However, the negative effect of prioritization on a delayed test is replicated with participants showing higher accuracy for non-prioritized items during testing. Measures of attention shifting and consistency impact learning performance but do not explain the negative prioritization effect at test.