Effects of Divided Attention at Retrieval on Conceptual Implicit Memory

Abstract

This study investigated whether conceptual implicit memory is sensitive to process-specific interference at the time of retrieval. Participants performed the implicit memory test of category exemplar generation (CEG; Experiments 1 and 3), or the matched explicit memory test of category-cued recall (Experiment 2), both of which are conceptually driven memory tasks, under one of two divided attention (DA) conditions in which participants simultaneously performed a distracting task. The distracting task was either syllable judgments (dissimilar processes), or semantic judgments (similar processes) on unrelated words. Compared to full attention (FA) in which no distracting task was performed, DA had no effect on CEG priming overall, but reduced category-cued recall similarly regardless of distractor task. Analyses of distractor task performance also revealed differences between implicit and explicit memory retrieval. The evidence suggests that, whereas explicit memory retrieval requires attentional resources and is disrupted by semantic and phonological distracting tasks, conceptual implicit memory is automatic and unaffected even when distractor and memory tasks involve similar processes.

The role of attention in perceptual and conceptual priming.

“…An opposite pattern was observed in a cued-recall (explicit memory) task. Prull et al (2016) did not observe any effect of divided attention on a category-exemplar production priming task. However, performance in a category cued-recall task was impaired by the presence of a distractor task, regardless of whether this task was semantic or phonological.…”

“…However, it is not possible to distinguish whether the effect of divided attention in this study was due to the nature of the test (conceptual and production) or to the secondary task’s level of difficulty. Importantly, this test was immune to the effects of divided attention in other studies (Lozito & Mulligan, 2010; Prull et al, 2016). For instance, Lozito and Mulligan (2010) used even–odd decision tasks that required frequent answers concomitantly with the target in the memory task.…”

“…Three studies so far have used the divided attention paradigm in the repetition priming retrieval phase (Clarke & Butler, 2008; Lozito & Mulligan, 2010; Prull, Lawless, Marshall, & Sherman, 2016). Performance in the word-stem completion task was not affected by divided attention even when a more difficult version of the task was used, where stimuli appeared more rapidly (Clarke & Butler, 2008).…”

Not explicit but implicit memory is influenced by individual perception style

“…These given words were carefully selected with consideration to “category norm” issue. Category norm is the first word coming to mind to an association word [ 15 – 19 ]. They generally depend on each person’s background such as culture and/or generation [ 16 ] (e.g.…”

“…The performance of the implicit memory test was calculated on that the number of Target answer was divided by thirty (the total number of 30 given words associated with the words/objects presented in the videos) ( S1 Table ), because we could ignore the answers to 30 Filler items (as described before). On this occasion, we carefully graded their scores to prevent counting the category norms [ 15 – 19 ] as their response words from implicit memory ( S1 Table ). The performance of the explicit memory test was calculated on that the number of correct answers was divided by sixty (the total number of given words in the explicit memory test), because we should deal with both presented and non-presented items to more accurately evaluate the explicit memory (as described before).…”