Attentional influences on memory formation: a tale of a not-so-simple story Ortiz Tudela, Francisco Javier Milliken, Bruce Jiménez, Luis Lupiáñez Castillo, Juan Is there a learning mechanism triggered by mere expectation violation? Is there some form of memory enhancement inherent to an event mismatching our predictions? Across seven experiments, we explore this issue by means of a validity paradigm. Although our manipulation clearly succeeded in generating an expectation and breaking it, the memory consequences of that expectation mismatch are not so obvious. We report here evidence of a null effect of expectation on memory formation. Our results (1) show that enhanced memory for unexpected events is not easily achieved and (2) call for a reevaluation of previous accounts of memory enhancements based on prediction error or difficulty of processing. Limitations of this study and possible implications for the field are discussed in detail. 2025-01-30T08:29:04Z 2025-01-30T08:29:04Z 2018-01-12 journal article Ortiz-Tudela, J., Milliken, B., Jiménez, L., & Lupiáñez, J. (2018). Attentional influences on memory formation: A tale of a not-so-simple story. Memory & Cognition, 46, 544-557. https://hdl.handle.net/10481/101071 10.3758/s13421-017-0784-2 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional