Similarity-based semantic interference (SI) hinders memory recognition. Within long-term visual memory paradigms, the more scenes (or objects) from the same semantic category are viewed, the harder it is to recognize each individual instance. A growing body of evidence shows that overt attention is intimately linked to memory. However, it is yet to be understood whether SI mediates overt attention during scene encoding, and so explain its detrimental impact on recognition memory. In the current experiment, participants watched 372 photographs belonging to different semantic categories (e.g., a kitchen) with different frequency (4, 20, 40 or 60 images), while being eye-tracked. After 10 minutes, they were presented with the same 372 photographs plus 372 new photographs and asked whether they recognized (or not) each photo (i.e., old/new paradigm). We found that the more the SI, the poorer the recognition performance, especially for old scenes of which memory representations existed. Scenes more widely explored were better recognized, but for increasing SI, participants focused on more local regions of the scene in search for its potentially distinctive details. Attending to the centre of the display, or to scene regions rich in low-level saliency was detrimental to recognition accuracy, and as SI increased participants were more likely to rely on visual saliency. The complexity of maintaining faithful memory representations for increasing SI also manifested in longer fixation durations; in fact, a more successful encoding was also associated with shorter fixations. Our study highlights the interdependence between attention and memory during high-level processing of semantic information.

基于相似性的语义干扰 (SI) 会阻碍记忆识别。在长期视觉记忆范式中，查看来自同一语义类别的场景（或对象）越多，识别每个实例就越困难。越来越多的证据表明，明显的注意力与记忆力密切相关。然而，SI 是否在场景编码过程中介导明显的注意力，并因此解释其对识别记忆的不利影响尚待了解。在当前的实验中，参与者在进行眼动追踪的同时，以不同的频率（4、20、40 或 60 张图像）观看了 372 张属于不同语义类别（例如厨房）的照片。10 分钟后，他们看到相同的 372 张照片和 372 张新照片，并询问他们是否识别（或不）每张照片（即旧/新范式）。我们发现 SI 越多，识别性能越差，尤其是对于存在记忆表征的旧场景。更广泛探索的场景被更好地识别，但为了增加 SI，参与者专注于场景的更多局部区域，以寻找其潜在的独特细节。关注显示的中心，或低层次显着性丰富的场景区域不利于识别准确性，并且随着 SI 的增加，参与者更有可能依赖视觉显着性。维持忠实记忆表征以增加 SI 的复杂性也表现在更长的注视持续时间；事实上，更成功的编码也与更短的注视有关。我们的研究强调了在语义信息的高级处理过程中注意力和记忆之间的相互依赖。