Attention, Learning, and Memory: The Fluency of Cognitive Processing

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SUMMARYWe are defined by our cognitive abilities of attending, learning, and remembering: They make us who we are. These overarching abilities are in turn made up of processesthe building blocks of our abilitiesthat we can use to select, encode, and retrieve information. Consequently, the fluency of these processes determines how well we manage and use information and how much we benefit from experience. An obvious example of this general principle is the development of our language skills through extensive practice, and the phenomenal facility that young children so quickly develop.This proposal describes two streams of a continuing program of research that has as its goal the understanding of fluent information processing. To accomplish this, we need “tools” to understand how basic processes work. To provide fundamental insight into the operation of cognitive processes, research on attention, learning, and memory relies heavily on how processes work together (facilitation) or compete (interference). When does prior experience help and when does it hurt our current processing? Irrelevant information must be ignored; if not, interference (slower and more error-prone responding) results. And when previous relevant processing assists current processing, this is expressed as facilitation (faster and more accurate responding). The proposed learning research constitutes the first stream. Here, we will examine our ability to learn simple associations in the form of contingencies. How does an irrelevant but correlated event influence how we respond to a target event? How do we learn and use connections in the world, even when we are not intending to do so? What role do attention and awareness play in this kind of learning? New studies will explore the learning of relations in the world both at the level of behaviour and at the level of underlying brain mechanisms.The proposed memory research constitutes the second stream. Here, we will continue to explore the production effect: improved memory for information spoken aloud (or produced in some other way) at the time of learning. We have argued that distinctiveness created during learning assists later remembering (“I remember that because I remember having said it aloud”) but does production also simply help to strengthen a memory? Does the value of production “spill over” onto other cognitive processes, such as comprehension? Again, studies will be carried out both at the behavioural and brain levels to answer these questions.The long-term significance of my research program is a deeper understanding of fluency in the interplay of these fundamental cognitive skillsa greater overall comprehension of how we attend, learn, and remember. The knowledge gained will inform work in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, and will support the development of practical applications and techniques that optimize our use of these skills.