Memory for unattended events: Remembering with and without awareness

Eich, Eric

doi:10.3758/bf03198423

Cited by 325 publications

(236 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…By doing so, we extended results of earlier experiments (Eich, 1984;Koriat & Feuerstein, 1976) that have shown differential effects of attention on conscious recollection, in comparison with other uses of memory. Dividing attention influenced people's ability to consciously recollect having read a name, as measured by list recognition, but left in place effects of reading a name on its familiarity, as indexed by fame judgments.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…When sufficient care is taken to ensure that items are truly unattended, little or no evidence of memory is found on a recognition memory test or a recall test (Fisk & Schneider, 1984;Moray, 1959), which leads to the claim that attention is necessary for memory. However, Eich (1984) found evidence of memory after divided attention by using a test that did not require conscious recollection. Homophones were presented to the unattended channel in a dichotic-listening task, accompanied by a word that biased the homophone to its less common interpretation (e.g., taxi-fare).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention.

Jacoby

Woloshyn²,

Kelley³

1989

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

589

480

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The familiarity of names produced by their prior presentation can be misinterpreted as fame. We used this false fame effect to separately study the effects of divided attention on familiarity versus conscious recollection. In a first experiment, famous and nonfamous names were presented to be read under conditions of full vs. divided attention. Divided attention greatly reduced later recognition memory performance but had no effect on gains in familiarity as measured by fame judgments. In later experiments, we placed recognition memory and familiarity in opposition by presenting only nonfamous names to be read in the first phase. Recognizing a name as earlier read on the later fame test allowed Ss to be certain that it was nonfamous. Divided attention at study or during the fame test reduced list recognition performance but had no effect on familiarity. We conclude that conscious recollection is an attention-demanding act that is separate from assessing familiarity.Folk wisdom suggests that we benefit from experience by consciously remembering those experiences and applying the knowledge gained from them to the current situation. In contrast, research shows that many effects of prior experience on later performance can occur independently of the ability to consciously recollect the experience (see Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988, for a review). In this article, we provide further evidence that the past can be used to influence present performance without the intervention of conscious recollection. We show that divided attention, in comparison with full attention, can radically reduce a person's ability to recognize an item as previously presented while leaving intact the effects of that prior presentation on judgment. Furthermore, this potential for unconscious influence of the past leads to a role for conscious recollection that is directly counter to that advanced by folk wisdom. Rather than being a prerequisite for producing effects of the past, conscious recollection can be a means of escaping misleading effects of the past.The task that we used required subjects to judge whether a name was famous. In the first phase of each experiment, people read a list of names. Then those old names were mixed with new famous and new nonfamous names in a test of fame

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention.

Jacoby

Woloshyn²,

Kelley³

1989

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

589

480

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For the study phase, the 32 homo phones used by Eich (1984) the targets and distractors in each block all had bee n on the spelling test or unspelled, depending on which spelling list the subject had heard. Spelled and unspelled homophones rotated across the four blocks.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering with and without awareness in a depressed mood: Evidence of deficits in initiative.

Hertel

Hardin²

1990

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

188

175

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We propose that depressive deficits in remembering are revealed in tasks that allow the spontaneous use of strategies; tasks that bypass or direct the use of strategies should not produce depressive deficits. College students received depressive-or neutral-mood inductions after answering questions worded to reflect homophones' less common meaning. After the inductions, subjects spelled old and new homophones and showed no effect of the depressive inductions on unaware memory for the old homophones. Subsequent tests of recognition did, however, reveal differences according to the induced mood or the presence of naturally occurring depression (in Experiment 3). The differences, evidence of nondepressed subjects' use of strategies, tended to disappear when all subjects were provided with strategies for spelling or recognition. The results indicate that depressives experience deficits in cognitive initiative. We review the literature on depressive memory from this perspective.

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“…Previous research has demonstrated priming effects in amnesic patients who lack explicit memory for study list items (Graf et al, 1984;Squire et al. 1985) and in normal subjects who perform extremely poorly on explicit tests following degraded encoding conditions (Eich, 1984;Jacoby et al,, 1989;Kunst-Wifson & Zajonc, 1980). The present results extend these findings by providing a demonstration of priming in test-unaware normal subjects following both semantic and nonsemantic study conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Eich (1984) presented subjects with a list of nonattended target words and then tested the subjects with both implicit (homophone spelling) and explicit (yes/'no recognition) memory tests. Priming was observed under these study conditions, even though explicit memory for the nonattended target words was at chance level, thereby suggesting that subjects were test unaware during performance of the implicit test.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit memory and test awareness.

Bowers¹,

Schacter²

1990

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

257

265

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In three experiments we examined whether normal subjects can perform an implicit test without becoming aware that the test items were previously encountered in the study phase of the experiment. Experiment 1 assessed single word priming with the stem completion task, and subjects who reported awareness/unawareness that the test items were previously encoded in the study task showed equivalent priming. Experiments 2a-c and 3 assessed associative priming with the stem completion task, and in this case, only subjects who were aware that the test items were previously encountered showed associative priming effects. These findings suggest that single word priming and associative priming reflect different memory processes because the former and not the latter effect can be observed in unaware subjects.

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Memory for unattended events: Remembering with and without awareness

Cited by 325 publications

References 27 publications

Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention.

Becoming famous without being recognized: Unconscious influences of memory produced by dividing attention.

Remembering with and without awareness in a depressed mood: Evidence of deficits in initiative.

Implicit memory and test awareness.

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