Forced-choice Recognition Task Research Articles

Everyday amnesia: Residual memory for high confidence misses and implications for decision models of recognition.

Despite studying a list of items only minutes earlier, when reencountered in a recognition memory test, undergraduate participants often say with total confidence that they have not studied some of the items before. Such high confidence miss (HCM) responses have been taken as evidence of rapid and complete forgetting and of everyday amnesia (Roediger & Tekin, 2020). We investigated (a) if memory for HCMs is completely lost or whether a residual memory effect exists and (b) whether dominant decision models predict the effect. Participants studied faces (Experiments 1a, 2, and 3) or words (Experiment 1b), then completed a single-item recognition memory task, followed by either (a) a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task, in which the studied and nonstudied alternatives on each trial were matched for their previous old/new decision and confidence rating (Experiments 1 and 2) or (b) a second single-item recognition task in which the targets and foils were HCMs and high confidence correct rejections, respectively (Experiment 3). In each experiment, participants reliably distinguished HCMs from high-confidence correct rejections. The unequal variance signal detection and dual-process signal detection models were fit to the single-item recognition data, and the parameter estimates were used to predict the memory effect for HCMs. The dual-process signal detection model predicted the residual memory effect (as did another popular model, the mixture signal detection theory model). However, the unequal variance signal detection model incorrectly predicted a negative, or no, effect, invalidating this model. The residual memory effect for HCMs demonstrates that everyday amnesia is not associated with complete memory loss and distinguishes between decision models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural correlates of individual differences in multimodal emotion recognition ability

Studies have reported substantial variability in emotion recognition ability (ERA) – an important social skill – but possible neural underpinnings for such individual differences are not well understood. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural responses during emotion recognition in young adults (N = 49) who were selected for inclusion based on their performance (high or low) during previous testing of ERA. Participants were asked to judge brief video recordings in a forced-choice emotion recognition task, wherein stimuli were presented in visual, auditory and multimodal (audiovisual) blocks. Emotion recognition rates during brain scanning confirmed that individuals with high (vs low) ERA received higher accuracy for all presentation blocks. fMRI-analyses focused on key regions of interest (ROIs) involved in the processing of multimodal emotion expressions, based on previous meta-analyses. In neural response to emotional stimuli contrasted with neutral stimuli, individuals with high (vs low) ERA showed higher activation in the following ROIs during the multimodal condition: right middle superior temporal gyrus (mSTG), right posterior superior temporal sulcus (PSTS), and right inferior frontal cortex (IFC). Overall, results suggest that individual variability in ERA may be reflected across several stages of decisional processing, including extraction (mSTG), integration (PSTS) and evaluation (IFC) of emotional information.

On investigating drivers’ attention allocation during partially-automated driving

The use of partially-automated systems require drivers to supervise the system functioning and resume manual control whenever necessary. Yet literature on vehicle automation show that drivers may spend more time looking away from the road when the partially-automated system is operational. In this study we answer the question of whether this pattern is a manifestation of inattentional blindness or, more dangerously, it is also accompanied by a greater attentional processing of the driving scene. Participants drove a simulated vehicle in manual or partially-automated mode. Fixations were recorded by means of a head-mounted eye-tracker. A surprise two-alternative forced-choice recognition task was administered at the end of the data collection whereby participants were quizzed on the presence of roadside billboards that they encountered during the two drives. Data showed that participants were more likely to fixate and recognize billboards when the automated system was operational. Furthermore, whereas fixations toward billboards decreased toward the end of the automated drive, the performance in the recognition task did not suffer. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that the use of the partially-automated driving system may result in an increase in attention allocation toward peripheral objects in the road scene which is detrimental to the drivers’ ability to supervise the automated system and resume manual control of the vehicle.

Dentate Gyrus Integrity Is Necessary for Behavioral Pattern Separation But Not Statistical Learning.

Pattern separation, the creation of distinct representations of similar inputs, and statistical learning, the rapid extraction of regularities across multiple inputs, have both been linked to hippocampal processing. It has been proposed that there may be functional differentiation within the hippocampus, such that the trisynaptic pathway (entorhinal cortex > dentate gyrus > CA3 > CA1) supports pattern separation, whereas the monosynaptic pathway (entorhinal cortex > CA1) supports statistical learning. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the behavioral expression of these two processes in B. L., an individual with highly selective bilateral lesions in the dentate gyrus that presumably disrupt the trisynaptic pathway. We tested pattern separation with two novel auditory versions of the continuous mnemonic similarity task, requiring the discrimination of similar environmental sounds and trisyllabic words. For statistical learning, participants were exposed to a continuous speech stream made up of repeating trisyllabic words. They were then tested implicitly through a RT-based task and explicitly through a rating task and a forced-choice recognition task. B. L. showed significant deficits in pattern separation on the mnemonic similarity tasks and on the explicit rating measure of statistical learning. In contrast, B. L. showed intact statistical learning on the implicit measure and the familiarity-based forced-choice recognition measure. Together, these results suggest that dentate gyrus integrity is critical for high-precision discrimination of similar inputs, but not the implicit expression of statistical regularities in behavior. Our findings offer unique new support for the view that pattern separation and statistical learning rely on distinct neural mechanisms.

Revisiting emotion recognition in different types of temporal lobe epilepsy: The influence of facial expression intensity

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can induce various difficulties in recognizing emotional facial expressions (EFE), particularly for negative valence emotions. However, these difficulties have not been systematically examined according to the localization of the epileptic focus. For this purpose, we used a forced-choice recognition task in which faces expressing fear, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, or happiness were presented in different intensity levels from moderate to high intensity. The first objective of our study was to evaluate the impact of emotional intensity on the recognition of different categories of EFE in TLE patients compared to control participants. The second objective was to assess the effect of localizationof epileptic focus on the recognition of EFE in patients with medial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) associated or not with hippocampal sclerosis (HS), or lateral temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE). The results showed that the 272 TLE patients and the 68 control participants were not differently affected by the intensity of EFE. However, we obtained group differences within the clinical population when we took into account the localization of the temporal lobe epileptic focus. As predicted, TLE patients were impaired in recognizing fear and disgust relative to controls. Moreover, the scores of these patients varied according to the localization of the epileptic focus, but not according to the cerebral lateralization of TLE. The facial expression of fear was less well recognized by MTLE patients, with or without HS, and the expression of disgust was less well recognized by LTLE as well as MTLE without HS patients. Moreover, emotional intensity modulated differently the recognition of disgust and surprise of the three patient groups underlying the relevance of using moderate emotional intensity to distinguish the effect of epileptic focus localization. These findings should be taken into account for interpreting the emotional behaviors and deserve to befurther investigated before considering TLE surgical treatment or social cognition interventions in TLE patients.

Visual attention across cultures: Similarities and differences in child development and maternal attention styles.

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture-specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross-cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous-heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers' attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye-tracking task, a picture description task and a forced-choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers' attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture-specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers' verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture-specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture-specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East-West dichotomy.

Recognition receiver operating characteristic asymmetry: Increased noise or information?

The recognition memory receiver operating characteristic (ROC) is typically asymmetric with a characteristic elevation of the left-hand portion. Whereas the unequal variance signal detection model (uvsd) assumes the asymmetry results because old item evidence is noisier than new item evidence, the dual process signal detection model (dpsd) assumes it results because old items convey more useful information than new items. To test these assumptions, the models were fit to old/new recognition data and their evidence parameters were used to predict performance on a novelty, three-alternative forced-choice (N3AFC) recognition task. Critically, under the uvsd model, increased old item variance (sigma) predicts poorer N3AFC performance, whereas under the dpsd model, increased recollection rates (Ro) predict better N3AFC performance. Hence, the asymmetry parameters of the two models make divergent predictions. In two experiments the dpsd model's predictions were supported, whereas the uvsd model yielded unpredicted (from that model's perspective) patterns. Through simulation it was also shown that the dpsd model predicted the uvsd model's mispredictions, which resulted because increases in old item noise markedly depress the upper portion of the ROC. Overall, the data demonstrate that increasing ROC asymmetry is not a function of increasingly noisier target evidence, but instead increasingly informative target evidence. These findings invalidate the uvsd model, which heretofore has been primarily supported by its post-hoc fitting ability, not its construct validity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Frequent experience with face coverings for 10 months improves emotion perception among individuals with high autistic traits: A repeated cross-sectional study.

Face coverings pose difficulties for emotion recognition, but it is unclear whether improvement in recognising emotions from the eyes is possible with experience and whether this might be dependent on one's autistic traits, given the associations between high autistic traits and poorer emotion perception and reduced gaze to the eye region. In this preregistered study, participants completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task with photographs of eyes and demographic questionnaires that measure their autistic traits and their interaction frequency with others wearing face coverings at two time points: once at the start of the face covering mandate and again 10 months later. We found that after 10 months, individuals with high autistic traits as a cohort recognised emotions from just the eyes better as a function of their experience with others wearing face coverings, suggesting that emotion perception is malleable even for those who have difficulties with emotion perception.

More Stable Memory Retention of Novel Words Learned from Fast Mapping than from Explicit Encoding.

There is a heated debate on a learning paradigm known as "fast mapping" for its early neocortical dependence and retained memory over time for amnesic patients with hippocampal system damage. Whether the fast mapping allows hippocampus independent learning and induces rapid integration is poorly understood. The present study aims to investigate the effect of fast mapping on very long-term retention, which to our knowledge has not been previously explored. We tested memory retention ranging from 10min to 1.5 years, for novel word-object associations learned from fast mapping or explicit encoding procedures. The three-alternative forced choice recognition task was employed to assess memory performance. Besides the slight adjustment of the testing schedule, other settings remained the same in Experiment 2 to replicate and verify the findings of Experiment 1. Results showed that overall memory retrieval performance was higher after explicit encoding as compared to fast mapping. However, retrieval performance after explicit encoding dropped after 1.5 years, but remained stable in the fast mapping condition. Furthermore, matching the semantic category of the known and the novel items during the fast mapping paradigm might affect long-term retention. These results suggest that fast mapping creates more stable long-term memory representations as compared to the explicit encoding strategy.

‘Musical effort’ and ‘musical pleasantness’: a pilot study on the neurophysiological correlates of classical music listening in adults normal hearing and unilateral cochlear implant users

Objective This pilot case-control study is aimed to estimate ‘musical effort’ and ‘musical pleasantness’ in adults normal hearing (NH) and Unilateral Cochlear Implant (UCI) users via neurophysiological indices and a cognitive-behavioural approach. Methods 7 NH and 7 UCI subjects underwent electroencephalographic (EEG) recording with two EEG indices, Approach Withdrawal (AW) and Workload (WI), and behavioural tests conducted during a forced-choice musical emotion recognition task performed in quiet and noise in two emotional conditions. Results Musical effort in terms of WI did not vary between conditions and groups. Inversely, for AW, statistically significant differences in noisy conditions were observed between groups, indicating a difficulty for the patients in discriminating the musical pleasantness in noise. However, self-reported data suggest the ability of UCI to cognitively evaluate the stimulus in terms of both auditory difficulty and pleasantness. Conclusion Findings suggest the possible relevance of the Cochlear Implant in supporting the patients’ effort in listening to music in noise, allowing a pleasant enjoyment in the quiet condition. Overall, this study appears worthy of interest and paves the way for further investigation by providing data on the neurophysiological perception of music.

Effects of Noninvasive Cervical Vagal Nerve Stimulation on Cognitive Performance But Not Brain Activation in Healthy Adults

ObjectivesWhile preliminary evidence suggests that noninvasive vagal nerve stimulation (nVNS) may enhance cognition, to our knowledge, no study has directly assessed the effects of nVNS on brain function and cognitive performance in healthy individuals. The aim of this study was therefore to assess whether nVNS enhances complex visuospatial problem solving in a normative sample. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine underlying neural substrates. Material and MethodsParticipants received transcutaneous cervical nVNS (N = 15) or sham (N = 15) stimulation during a 3 T fMRI scan. Stimulation lasted for 2 min at 24 V for nVNS and at 4.5 V for sham. Subjects completed a matrix reasoning (MR) task in the scanner and a forced-choice recognition task outside the scanner. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to assess group differences in cognitive performance. And linear mixed effects (LMEs) regression analysis was used to assess main and interaction effects of experimental groups, level of MR task difficulty, and recall accuracy on changes in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal. ResultsSubjects who received nVNS showed higher accuracy for both easy (p = 0.017) and hard (p = 0.013) items of the MR task, slower reaction times for hard items (p = 0.014), and fewer false negative errors during the forced-choice recognition task (p = 0.047). MR task difficulty related to increased activation in frontoparietal regions (p < 0.001). No difference between nVNS and sham stimulation was found on BOLD response during performance of the MR task. ConclusionsWe hypothesize that nVNS increased attention compared to sham, and that this effect led to enhanced executive functions, and consequently to better performance on visuospatial reasoning and recognition tasks. Results provide initial support that nVNS may be a low-risk, low-cost treatment for cognitive disorders.

Effects of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss and signal amplification on vocal emotion recognition in middle-aged–older individuals

Previous research has shown deficits in vocal emotion recognition in sub-populations of individuals with hearing loss, making this a high priority research topic. However, previous research has only examined vocal emotion recognition using verbal material, in which emotions are expressed through emotional prosody. There is evidence that older individuals with hearing loss suffer from deficits in general prosody recognition, not specific to emotional prosody. No study has examined the recognition of non-verbal vocalization, which constitutes another important source for the vocal communication of emotions. It might be the case that individuals with hearing loss have specific difficulties in recognizing emotions expressed through prosody in speech, but not non-verbal vocalizations. We aim to examine whether vocal emotion recognition difficulties in middle- aged-to older individuals with sensorineural mild-moderate hearing loss are better explained by deficits in vocal emotion recognition specifically, or deficits in prosody recognition generally by including both sentences and non-verbal expressions. Furthermore a, some of the studies which have concluded that individuals with mild-moderate hearing loss have deficits in vocal emotion recognition ability have also found that the use of hearing aids does not improve recognition accuracy in this group. We aim to examine the effects of linear amplification and audibility on the recognition of different emotions expressed both verbally and non-verbally. Besides examining accuracy for different emotions we will also look at patterns of confusion (which specific emotions are mistaken for other specific emotion and at which rates) during both amplified and non-amplified listening, and we will analyze all material acoustically and relate the acoustic content to performance. Together these analyses will provide clues to effects of amplification on the perception of different emotions. For these purposes, a total of 70 middle-aged-older individuals, half with mild-moderate hearing loss and half with normal hearing will perform a computerized forced-choice vocal emotion recognition task with and without amplification.

Musical instrument familiarity affects statistical learning of tone sequences

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, computerized instruments or familiar instruments (piano or violin). Knowledge of the statistical regularities was measured as by a two-alternative forced choice recognition task, requiring discrimination between novel sequences that followed versus violated the statistical structure, assessed at three time points (immediately post-training, as well as one day and one week post-training). Compared to artificial instruments, training on familiar instruments resulted in reduced accuracy. Moreover, sequences from familiar instruments – but not artificial instruments – were more likely to be judged as grammatical when they contained intervals that approximated those commonly used in Western music, even though this cue was non-informative. Overall, these results demonstrate that instrument familiarity can interfere with the learning of novel statistical regularities, presumably through biasing memory representations to be aligned with Western musical structures. These results demonstrate that real-world experience influences statistical learning in a non-linguistic domain, supporting the view that statistical learning involves the continuous updating of existing representations, rather than the establishment of entirely novel ones.

Bilingual advantage in L3 vocabulary acquisition: evidence of a generalized learning benefit among classroom-immersion children

AbstractThe present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared to monolinguals, and the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted the English word learning performance of French fifth-graders attending either a monolingual school program or a classroom-immersion program with German as an L2. Half of the items to be learned were German/English (L2/L3) cognate words while the other half were monolingual English (L3) words. Learning was assessed with a forced-choice recognition task, a go/no-go auditive recognition task and an orthographic judgment task. Results yielded a generalized bilingual advantage, with classroom-immersion children outperforming monolinguals on all tasks, irrespective of cognateness, except for the orthographic task. These findings advocate for a bilingual advantage in children that is globally not driven by the specific language properties of cognates, except for the written modality.

Developmental Differences in Subjective Recollection and Its Role in Decision Making.

We examined how subjective assessments of recollection guide decision making. Subjective recollection was dissociated from accuracy during a forced-choice recognition task. Distracters were either similar to targets (match condition) or to other studied, but untested items (nonmatch condition). We assessed 223 participants (112 males) across three experiments (137 White, 37 Asian-American, 7 African-American, 4 American-Indian, 32 mixed race, 6 undisclosed). In Experiment 1, 6- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 119) were less accurate (d = 0.70), but more likely to claim subjective recollection and make memory selections in anticipation of a reward in the nonmatch condition (ds = 0.64-0.70). This pattern was eliminated in 6- to 7-year-olds when we limited the number of selections (Experiment 2, N = 52), but was replicated when we required the selections to be counted (Experiment 3, N = 52), underscoring the effects of decision complexity on children's self-reflections.

The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children

The way humans attend to their visual field differs profoundly between individuals. Previous research suggests that people tend to have either an analytic style, with a higher focus on the salient object of a scene, or a holistic style, characterized by higher attention to a scene's contextual information. Although a general assumption in many studies has been that these attention styles are socialized in social interaction during childhood, not much work has focused on the proximal mechanisms underlying this development. This study focuses on language as a potential cultural tool to habitualize ways of perceiving the world and investigates whether the visual attention of 4- to 9-year-old children can be experimentally manipulated via verbal primes that accentuate either analytic or holistic processing. Results indicate that verbal priming is effective in guiding children's gaze behavior in an eye-tracking task and their verbal accounts in a picture description task, but it only influences the way visual scenes are remembered in a forced-choice recognition task after own verbal productions. In concert with previous cross-cultural and correlational studies, these findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays an important role in the socialization of attention styles.

Impaired Recognition of Facial and Vocal Emotions in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

The ability to recognize others' emotions is a central aspect of socioemotional functioning. Emotion recognition impairments are well documented in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, but it is less understood whether they are also present in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Results on facial emotion recognition are mixed, and crucially, it remains unclear whether the potential impairments are specific to faces or extend across sensory modalities. In the current study, 32 MCI patients and 33 cognitively intact controls completed a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and two forced-choice emotion recognition tasks, including visual and auditory stimuli. The emotion recognition tasks required participants to categorize emotions in facial expressions and in nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) expressing neutrality, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasure, surprise, or sadness. MCI patients performed worse than controls for both facial expressions and vocalizations. The effect was large, similar across tasks and individual emotions, and it was not explained by sensory losses or affective symptomatology. Emotion recognition impairments were more pronounced among patients with lower global cognitive performance, but they did not correlate with the ability to perform activities of daily living. These findings indicate that MCI is associated with emotion recognition difficulties and that such difficulties extend beyond vision, plausibly reflecting a failure at supramodal levels of emotional processing. This highlights the importance of considering emotion recognition abilities as part of standard neuropsychological testing in MCI, and as a target of interventions aimed at improving social cognition in these patients.

Socioeconomic disparities in the comprehension of lexical categories. A study with Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers

This study documents the effects of social inequality on different dimensions of lexical comprehension in Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers, a population in which socioeconomic differences are more striking than in previously studied populations. Using a performance-based forced-choice lexical recognition task implemented on a tablet, an adaptation of the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT; Friend and Keplinger. Journal of Child Language, 35(01), 77-98. 2003), recognition accuracy and haptic response time to nouns, verbs, and adjectives were assessed. Low and middle (socioeconomic status) SES toddlers (N = 113) were tested at the daycares they attended. Results of the regression analyses showed overall SES effects on recognition accuracy but not on response time. Further analyses that considered the lexical category identified that middle SES children were only more accurate on the recognition of nouns and adjectives but not verbs. Findings also indicated that while low SES children showed longer response times to adjectives than to the other lexical categories, middle SES response times were longer in the case of verbs. The discussion links SES differences in children performance to previous evidence regarding the characteristics of both groups of children’s linguistic experiences in the ebb and flow of everyday life.

Feasibility of remote assessment of the binaural intelligibility level difference in school-age children.

This work evaluated the feasibility and reliability of remotely assessing masked speech recognition and the binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) in children. Participants were 28 children (6–17 years) and 11 adults (22–45 years) with self-reported normal hearing. A three-alternative forced-choice word recognition task was completed using participants' personal hardware (headphones and computer) and custom software that uploaded results to a central database. Results demonstrate that assessment of masked speech recognition and the BILD is feasible and generally reliable in a remote setting. Variability of results across individuals would likely have been reduced by distributing or specifying appropriate headphones.

Testing a load theory framework for food-related cognition.

The way we process rewarding stimuli is widely held to play a key role in normal and abnormal behavior. Biased processing of food-arguably the most primal form of reward-has been strongly implicated in the obesity crisis. Paradoxically, however, existing evidence suggests that both too much and too little attention can potentially lead to overeating. Here we sought to explain this contradiction within the framework of the load theory of attention, while also elucidating the relatively understudied role of memory biases. In 3 experiments, we presented food and nonfood images as irrelevant distractors during a letter search task with high and low levels of perceptual load, followed by a forced choice recognition task. As predicted, increasing perceptual load consistently powerfully reduced distraction by food and nonfood images alike. Similarly, food images encountered under high perceptual load were less likely to be recognized in a surprise memory test. Unexpectedly, however, there was a striking absence of attentional bias to food above and beyond salient nonfood stimuli, either within-subjects or in relation to traits implicated in food-biases. By contrast, a food memory bias was consistently observed across participants, and appeared independent of attentional biases. Food memory was consistently heightened in individuals with high levels of trait disinhibition (a measure of opportunistic eating). Our findings suggest that attention and memory for food and nonfood are similarly impacted by perceptual load. We discuss implications of the load theory framework for the wider literature on food-related cognition and for real world eating behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).