Is visual attention required for robust picture memory?

Humans can remember many scenes for a long time after brief presentation. Do scene understanding and encoding processes require visual selective attention, or do they occur even when observers are engaged in other visual tasks? We showed observers scene or texture images while they performed a visual search task, an auditory detection task, or no concurrent task. Concurrent tasks interfered with memory for both image types. Visual search interfered more than effects of auditory detection even when the two tasks were equally difficult. The same pattern of results was obtained with concurrent tasks presented during the encoding or consolidation phases. We conclude that visual attention modulates picture memory performance. We did not find any aspect of picture memory to be independent of attentional demands.