Amnesia for object attributes: Failure to report attended information that had just reached conscious awareness

We intuitively believe that when we become consciously aware of a visual stimulus, we will be able to remember it for immediate report. The present study provides a series of striking demonstrations that are inconsistent with such an intuition. Four experiments showed that in certain conditions, participants cannot report an attribute (e.g. letter identity) of a stimulus, even when that attribute had been attended and reached a full state of conscious awareness just prior to the question. We term this effect attribute amnesia and it occurs when participants locate a target using one attribute for several repetitions and are then surprisingly asked to report that attribute. This discovery suggests that attention to a stimulus attribute and being aware of it are insufficient to ensure its reportability immediately afterwards. Furthermore, our results strongly imply that cognitive processes have separate designations of what information will be attended and what will be remembered.