Hypermnesia for subliminal stimuli.
Item
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Title
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Hypermnesia for subliminal stimuli.
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Identifier
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AAI9325108
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identifier
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9325108
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Creator
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Ionescu, Marcos Drago.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Matthew H. Erdelyi
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Experimental | Psychology, Social
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Abstract
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The phenomenon of hypermnesia (net increase in memory with repeated testing) was investigated in a series of experiments. Experiment 1 examined memory for a single pictorial stimulus shown for one of three exposure durations (500 msec, 50 msec, and 5 msec). The stimulus consisted of 12 simple objects arranged in three rows of 4 figures each. No increase in memory over three trials was found for any of the exposure durations. Experiments 2-4 assayed hypermnesia for a list of stimuli (40 pictures, 40 words) presented for a wide variety of exposures, ranging from 5 sec to 5 msec. Hypermnesia was found at all exposure durations with the possible exception of the 5 msec duration (a trend in Experiment 2 and a significant effect in Experiment 3). When exposure durations were made "absolutely subliminal" (chance level performance on the first recall attempt) through the use of a graded series of neutral density filters at the 5 msec exposure duration, no hypermnesia was found in any of the groups (Experiment 5). Control groups (subjects shown sham flashes) were employed in all the experiments to evaluate guessing performance. Reminiscence, which measures the number of correct new items recovered beyond the initial recall trial, regardless of whether earlier recalled items are recalled again or forgotten on later trials, was also examined in Experiments 2-5. It was found that the reminiscence functions were virtually identical for control and experimental groups in these studies, regardless of stimulus exposure durations. This insensitivity of reminiscence to exposure conditions, and even to the presence or absence of stimuli (sham flashes), raises questions about the appropriateness of reminiscence as a measure of stimulus recovery. The basic conclusions to be derived from these studies are: (1) A single complex stimulus does not yield hypermnesia (Experiment 1); (2) When stimuli exposures are supraliminal, hypermnesia tends to occur for serially presented lists of pictorial stimuli, even at very short exposure durations (50 msec and, in Experiment 3, 5 msec); (3) When lists of stimuli are degraded enough so that they are absolutely subliminal, recall hypermnesia fails to occur (Experiment 5); (4) Reminiscence failed to reflect exposure duration, raising questions about its adequacy as a sensitive indicator of recall level or recall improvement.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
