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Feature-based and location-based volitional covert attention affect memory at different timescales

Our ongoing subjective experiences, and our memories of those experiences, are shaped by our prior experiences, goals, and situational understanding. These factors shape how we allocate our attentional resources over different aspects of our ongoing experiences. These attentional shifts may happen overtly (e.g., when we change where we are looking) or covertly (e.g., without any explicit physical manifestation). Additionally, we may attend to what is happening at a specific spatial location (e.g., because we think something important is happening there) or we may attend to particular features irrespective of their locations (e.g., when we search for a friend's face in a crowd). We ran two covert attention experiments that differed in how long they asked participants to maintain the focus of the features or locations they were attending. Later, the participants performed a recognition memory task for attended, unattended, and novel stimuli. Participants were able to shift the location of their covert attentional focus more rapidly than they were able to shift their focus of covert attention to stimulus features, and the effects of location-based attention on memory were longer-lasting than the effects of feature-based attention.