Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study sought to investigate the relationship between attention, perception and memory in the perception and recall of attended and unattended properties of objects. Two experiments tested whether the intention to perceive maximum overhead reaching height with the use of handheld rods with different mass and rotational inertia yielded information for participants to remember the rods’ heaviness after they were removed from view. Participants remembered the difference in heaviness of rods but only when haptic information was solely available during the earlier perception of overhead reaching height and vision was occluded. The results support an ecological approach to perception, attention and memory, and suggest that information detected for perception can be later used to remember other object properties that have a correlated informational basis.