Interpreting the influence of implicitly activated memories on recall and recognition.

Abstract

A model concerning the influence of implicitly activated information on cued recall and recognition is presented. The model assumes that studying a familiar word activates its associates and creates an implicit representation in long-term working memory. Test cues also activate their associates, with memory performance determined by a sampling process that operates on the intersection of information activated by the test cue with information previously activated by the studied word. Successful sampling is enhanced by preexisting connections among the associates of the studied word and by preexisting connections between it and the retrieval cue. However, the usefulness of the implicit representation is reduced by the activation of competing associates and by shifts of attention before testing. Experiments designed to test predictions of the model indicate that the associates of a familiar word can exert a powerful effect on its cued recall and recognition.

Out of one’s mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories

“…Thus, nothing in the immediate or recent environment is responsible as far as one can tell but some combination and spreading of activation did in fact produce the phenomenon, i.e., two activations unrelated in both time and content may produce a mental content that is both unexpected and seems contextually irrelevant (cf. Nelson et al, 1998).…”

“…For example, in semantic priming experiments such indirect activations have been assessed by measuring reaction times (in a lexical decision task) to target words which are semantically related to previously presented primes (e.g., Fischler, 1977;Neely, 1976;. In addition, there are several other lines of research which have shown that automatic activation of related information in response to a target word can exert strong effects on performance in such different tasks as free recall and recognition (Mandler, & Rabinowitz, 1981;Roediger, & McDermott, 1995), cued recall (Nelson et al, 1998), implicit memory tasks (McDermott, 1997), reading and text comprehension (Kintsch, 1988;Sharkey, & Mitchell, 1985). For example, McDermott (1997) showed that associative activation of a non presented prime word in a list of semantically related words was sufficient to produce priming on both conceptual (i.e., word association test) and perceptual implicit memory tests (such as word stem and word fragment completion).…”

“…For example, Underwood (1965) argued that processing a word is likely to produce its associate into conscious awareness at encoding whereas others have pointed out that such associative and non conscious activations can in principle (but not always) result in conscious representation of the associate (e.g., see McDermott, 1997;Nelson, McKinney, Gee, & Janczura, 1998). Names).…”

Implicit Cognition and Addiction: An Introduction

“…McEvoy and Nelson (Chapter 5) review different techniques for studying implicit memory: the methods of savings and of indirect test instructions, and the process dissociation procedure (see also Chapter 20). They then describe their model of cued recall that incorporates both implicit and explicit memory processes (PIER2, which is described in Chapter 5; Nelson et al, 1998), and illustrate it with examples relevant to addictive behaviors. Section II focuses on assessment paradigms and their theoretical basis.…”

Intuitive decision making as a gradual process: investigating semantic intuition‐based and priming‐based decisions with fMRI

“…In other words, “the greater the associative‐spreading along the associative connections is (Collins and Loftus 1975; Anderson 1983), the greater is the activation “echo” from associated units back to the target item's unit (Nelson et al. 1998)” (Hofmann et al. 2011, p. 2).…”