Previous evidence demonstrated that individuals can recall a target’s location in a search display even if location information is completely task-irrelevant. This finding raises the question: does this ability to automatically encode a single item’s location into a reportable memory trace extend to other aspects of spatial information as well? We tested this question using a paradigm designed to elicit attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, Psychological Science, 26(2) 203-210, 2015a). Participants were initially asked to report the location of a target letter among digits with stimuli arranged to form one of two or four spatial configurations varying randomly across trials. After completing numerous trials that matched their expectations, participants were surprised with a series of unexpected questions probing their memory for various aspects of the display they had just viewed. Participants had a profound inability to report which spatial configuration they had just perceived when the target’s location was not unique to a specific configuration (i.e., orthogonal). Despite being unable to report the most recent configuration, answer choices on the surprise trial were focused around previously seen configurations, rather than novel configurations. Thus, there were clear memories of the set of configurations that had been viewed during the experiment but not of the specific configuration from the most recent trial. This finding helps to set boundary conditions on previous findings regarding the automatic encoding of location information into memory.

先前的证据表明，即使位置信息与任务完全无关，个人也可以在搜索显示中回忆目标的位置。这一发现提出了一个问题：这种将单个项目的位置自动编码为可报告的记忆轨迹的能力是否也扩展到空间信息的其他方面？我们使用旨在引发属性性遗忘症的范式测试了这个问题（Chen & Wyble，Psychological Science，26(2) 203-210, 2015a)。参与者最初被要求报告数字中目标字母的位置，刺激被安排形成两个或四个空间配置之一，这些空间配置在试验中随机变化。在完成了符合他们预期的无数试验后，参与者对一系列意想不到的问题感到惊讶，这些问题探究了他们对刚刚看过的显示器的各个方面的记忆。当目标位置不在时，参与者完全无法报告他们刚刚感知到的空间配置。特定配置所独有（即正交）。尽管无法报告最近的配置，但意外试验的答案选择集中在以前看到的配置上，而不是新颖的配置上。因此，对在实验期间查看过的配置集有清晰的记忆，但对最近试验中的特定配置没有记忆。这一发现有助于为先前关于将位置信息自动编码到内存中的发现设置边界条件。