Attribute amnesia is greatly reduced with novel stimuli

Attribute amnesia is the counterintuitive phenomenon where observers are unable to report a salient aspect of a stimulus (e.g., its colour or its identity) immediately after the stimulus was presented, despite both attending to and processing the stimulus. Almost all previous attribute amnesia studies used highly familiar stimuli. Our study investigated whether attribute amnesia would also occur for unfamiliar stimuli. We conducted four experiments using stimuli that were highly familiar (colours or repeated animal images) or that were unfamiliar to the observers (unique animal images). Our results revealed that attribute amnesia was present for both sets of familiar stimuli, colour (p < .001) and repeated animals (p = .001); but was greatly attenuated, and possibly eliminated, when the stimuli were unique animals (p = .02). Our data shows that attribute amnesia is greatly reduced for novel stimuli.