Reactivating a Reactivation Theory of Implicit Memory

Bower, Gordon H.

doi:10.1006/ccog.1996.0004

Cited by 64 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 174 publications

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“…In Mandler's terms DPT postulates two processes that operate on mental representationsactivation/integration and elaboration (cf. Bower, 1996). In contrast, elaboration is the process whereby mental contents are related to one another.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kvavilashvili

Mandler

2004

Cognitive Psychology

198

209

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The study of memories that pop into one's mind without any conscious attempt to retrieve them began only recently. While there are some studies on involuntary autobiographical memories (e.g., Berntsen, 1996; research on involuntary semantic memories or mind-popping is virtually non existent. The latter is defined as an involuntary conscious occurrence of brief items of one's network of semantic knowledge. The recall of these items (e.g., a word, a name, a tune) is not accompanied by additional contextual information and/or involvement of self -a standard feature of involuntary autobiographical memories. The paper reports several diary and questionnaire studies which looked into the nature and frequency of occurrence of these memories. The data show that people do experience involuntary semantic memories which tend to occur without any apparent cues while being engaged in relatively automatic activities. Possible mechanisms of involuntary semantic memories are discussed (e.g., very long-term priming), and the results of the study provide information on the possible duration of the priming effects in everyday life.Related theoretical and methodological issues and future avenues of research in this neglected area are outlined.KEY WORDS: Involuntary memories, mind-popping, autobiographical memory, semantic memory, very long-term priming, implicit memory. 3Out of one's mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories Most laboratory studies of memory investigate processes which deliberately retrieve or identify information acquired in the past. However, much of our everyday remembering consists of information coming to mind involuntarily, i.e., without any conscious attempts to retrieve anything (Mandler, 1986; Winograd, 1993). This type of retrieval has been noted as far back as by Ebbinghaus (1885Ebbinghaus ( /1964 who, among other forms of memory, delineated memories which occur "with apparent spontaneity and without any act of will", and are "brought about through the instrumentality of other, immediately present mental images" (p. 2). Mandler (1989) claimed that "deliberate retrieval of information seems to be the exception rather than the rule" (p. 103). Thus, "we interrupt our stream of thought with ideas that suddenly 'come to mind', we are frequently 'reminded' of one or another occurrence in the past, and often we are aware of memories whose apparent irrelevance to the requirements of the moment surprises us" (p. 291, Mandler, 1986; our italics).Involuntary memories vary greatly in their character and conditions under which they occur (see Mandler, 1994). For example, the phenomenon of incubation, or a sudden recovery from the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, or the realization that one had intended to do something at this particular moment (i.e., prospective remembering) -all refer to involuntary retrieval of certain memories and contents.Although the act of retrieval per se is non deliberate and usually sudden, in all those cases it is preceded by repeated attempts to solve a problem (incubation), by a memory...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kvavilashvili

Mandler

2004

Cognitive Psychology

198

209

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“…Our main hypothesis of age-related improvements in priming of atypical exemplars was guided by theoretical considerations and empirical findings that underline the role of exemplar typicality in the development of category knowledge. With study lists of categorically related items, both explicit and implicit memory performance rely heavily on categorical-relational encoding processes (see, e.g., Mulligan, 1996;Mulligan et al, 1999) or-in terms of activation views-on the activation and reactivation of categorical relations in semantic memory (see e.g., Bower's [1996] reactivation theory of implicit memory). These processes are guided by category knowledge.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related improvements in a conceptual implicit memory test

2003

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The present study investigated developmental improvements in category exemplar generation priming in children from kindergarten to older elementary school age. The strength of categorical links for atypical exemplars increases in this age range, whereas category knowledge for typical exemplars remains relatively stable. Therefore, in comparison with older children, younger children should show less categorical-relationalencoding and, thus, less priming for atypical items but not for typical items. This expectation was confirmed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, picture versus word format at study dissociated implicit and explicit performance, indicating that the age-related increase in priming for atypical exemplars in Experiment 1 was not an artifact of explicit contamination. The findings suggest that developmental improvements in conceptual priming can be observed when the conceptual knowledge relevant for a given task improves over the age range tested.

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“…They postulated that exposure to each pattern involves some incremental learning. (See also Bower, 1996, for a similar account.) We refer to this postulate as the "incremental learning hypothesis."…”

Section: Repetition Primingmentioning

confidence: 92%

Long-term semantic priming: A computational account and empirical evidence.

Becker¹,

Moscovitch²,

Behrmann³

et al. 1997

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

181

222

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Semantic priming is traditionally viewed as an effect that rapidly decays. A new view of long-term word priming in attractor neural networks is proposed. The model predicts long-term semantic priming under certain conditions. That is, the task must engage semantic-level processing to a sufficient degree. The predictions were confirmed in computer simulations and in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 showed that when target words are each preceded by multiple semantically related primes, there is long-lag priming on a semanticdecision task but not on a lexical-decision task. Experiment 2 replicated the long-term semantic priming effect for semantic decisions with only one prime per target. Experiment 3 demonstrated semantic priming with much longer word lists at lags of 0, 4, and 8 items. These are the first experiments to demonstrate a semantic priming effect spanning many intervening items and lasting much longer than a few seconds.Many forms of priming have been studied (for reviews, see Monsell, 1985;Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988;Schacter, 1987). Whereas in repetition priming the priming stimulus is identical to the target, in similarity-based priming tests (e.g., form priming, morphological priming, and semantic priming), the prime and target are different words sharing some surface features, semantic features, or both. Repetition priming and form priming have been found to produce long-lasting effects ranging from hours to weeks or even months (e.g., Bentin & Feldman, 1990; Bentin & Moscovitch, 1988;Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Rueckl, 1990;Sloman, Hayman, Ohta, Law, & Tulving, 1988). Semantic priming, however, is traditionally thought to produce only short-term effects that dissipate after several seconds or after more than one item intervenes between prime and target stimuli. Is it possible that completely different priming mechanisms are operating at semantic levels of processing as compared with other levels at which priming could occur? The most parsimonious account would be that the same mechanisms operate at all levels of the system. In this article, we are concerned particularly with long-term priming and argue in favor of a single mechanism to account for all types of long-term priming. Our view is that short-term semantic priming involves a process completely different from that underlying long-term priming, but either type of process should behave according to the same computational principles at any level of the system, whether it be perceptual or semantic. Although our account of long-term priming is very general, our focus is specifically on semantic priming because our model makes novel predictions in this domain. We first present a theoretical account of long-term priming based on a distributed cormectionist model of word recognition, combined with some very general learning-processing assumptions. The theory specifies conditions under which long-term priming should occur and predicts that semantic priming should produce long-term effects under the appropriate conditions (even though it has not been fo...

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Reactivating a Reactivation Theory of Implicit Memory

Cited by 64 publications

References 174 publications

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

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

Age-related improvements in a conceptual implicit memory test

Long-term semantic priming: A computational account and empirical evidence.

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