Reading stories while responding to colors: The attentional boost effect for coherent verbal stimuli

Background stimuli presented with an unrelated target in a detection task are better remembered than those presented with a distractor. This attentional boost effect (ABE) has been shown with randomly sequenced, unrelated background images or words. This study examines whether coherent narratives providing meaningful temporal structure interfere with the ABE. Participants studied a series of words for a later memory test while monitoring a concurrent stream of colored squares, pressing the spacebar for target colors and ignoring distractor colors. The words either formed a coherent story (Experiments 1, 3, and 5) or were scrambled in order (Experiments 2 and 4), with a target-to-distractor ratio of 1:1 (Experiments 1-3) or 1:4 (Experiments 4 and 5). Results showed that words paired with the target color were better remembered than those paired with the distractor color, confirming the ABE. However, the ABE was equivalent for coherent and incoherent words, suggesting that narrative coherence did not affect its temporal precision. Contrary to the idea that coherence or temporal relatedness may impose its own temporal structure, the results support the temporal orienting account of the ABE, indicating that target detection triggers a temporally precise orienting response that enhances concurrent task processing. However, constructing a narrative from related words may increase cognitive load, leading to a consistently small ABE across experiments.