Conscious awareness effects in implicit memory tasks: New directions for the explicit memory contamination issue.
Item
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Title
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Conscious awareness effects in implicit memory tasks: New directions for the explicit memory contamination issue.
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Identifier
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AAI9986357
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identifier
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9986357
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Creator
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Mace, John H.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Arthur S. Reber
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Date
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2000
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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, Cognitive | Psychology, Experimental
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Abstract
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There have been two concerns associated with subjects' awareness in unconscious (implicit) memory tasks: (1) it may lead to voluntary conscious (explicit) memory contamination, where subjects intentionally try to recall items from a prior study list; or (2) it may lead to involuntary explicit memory contamination, where items from a prior study list come to mind automatically as a function of conscious awareness.;While implicit memory researchers generally agree that awareness could lead to intentional recall processes in implicit memory studies, they do not believe that awareness alone (independent of intentional recall) will influence performance on implicit memory tasks (e.g., Bowers & Schacter, 1990).;The view that mere awareness does not affect performance on implicit memory tasks is based on a single study (Bowers & Schacter, 1990), where the performance of unaware subjects did not differ from aware on a number of indicators (i.e., level of priming and outcome following levels of processing study, LOP). More recently, however, a number of pilot studies (Mace, 1996, 2000a) have shown that awareness may affect performance on implicit tasks, where, for example, unaware subjects differed from aware on these same indicators.;This study investigated the possibility that awareness could influence performance on implicit memory tasks. In three experiments, the performance of unaware subjects was compared to aware on a word stem task following study under LOP conditions.;In all three experiments, the results showed the performance of unaware subjects differing from aware on the LOP variable and level of priming following semantic study. While aware subjects showed null and small (but nonsignificant) LOP effects on the word stem task, unaware subjects showed significant LOP reversals. While aware subjects showed robust priming for semantic study, semantic study priming was not significant for unaware subjects. The results also suggested that the effects of awareness for aware subjects were largely involuntary, where their performance on the word stem task dissociated from intentional recall subjects on LOP and response latencies, for example.;The results have a number of implications for the study of implicit memory. One, they suggest that implicit memory research may need to be conducted with samples of unaware subjects. Two, the LOP reversal and nonsignificant semantic study priming are novel findings which appear to have important implications for implicit memory theory.
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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.
