The effects of divided attention on auditory priming

Abstract

The concept of attention plays a central role in theories of memory, a view supported by a long history of findings that attentional state during encoding affects later memory performance (e.g., Broadbent, 1958;Cowan, 1995;Norman, 1969). Traditional research on this topic has focused on explicit memory. More recently, researchers have addressed the relationship between attention and implicit memory, spurred by the well-documented dissociations between implicit and explicit memory (Mulligan, 2003b;Roediger & McDermott, 1993), as well as the possibility that attention during encoding may not be as crucial to implicit memory as it is to explicit memory.Several initial studies of attention and implicit memory reported the rather startling result that dividing attention reduced explicit test performance but left implicit tests unaffected (e.g., Bentin, Kutas, & Hillyard, 1995;Mulligan & Hartman, 1996;Parkin, Reid, & Russo, 1990;Russo & Parkin, 1993; SchmitterEdgecombe, 1996). Other early studies demonstrated that retention of very poorly attended stimuli is more likely to be detected with implicit than explicit memory tests (e.g., Bornstein, Leone, & Galley, 1987;Eich, 1984;Jelicic, Bonke, Wolters, & Phaf, 1992;Mandler, Nakamura, & Van Zandt, 1987;Merikle & Reingold, 1991; cf. Berry, Shanks, & Henson, 2006). Such findings imply that attention plays a larger role in encoding for explicit than implicit memory. Other researchers have gone farther in interpreting these results, proposing that implicit memory is chiefly the result of automatic encoding processes (the automaticity hypothesis, e.g., Aloisi, McKone, & Heubeck, 2004;Bentin et al., 1995;Shallice et al., 1994;Szymanski & MacLeod, 1996;Wolters & Prinsen, 1997). Much subsequent research on this topic took place under the rubric of the transfer-appropriateprocessing (TAP) view of implicit and explicit memory (e.g., Roediger, 1990;Roediger & McDermott, 1993), which provides a more differentiated view based on the distinction between conceptual and perceptual priming. This view suggests that implicit tests drawing heavily on conceptual processes should depend heavily on attention during encoding. However, perceptual priming tasks, sensitive to relatively automatic perceptual encoding processes (Roediger, 1990), should be little affected by manipulations of attention (see Mulligan & Hartman, 1996, for a more detailed development of the TAP predictions). With respect to conceptual implicit memory, these expectations are largely borne out: divided attention typically reduces conceptual priming (see Mulligan & Brown, 2003, for a review).Studies of perceptual implicit tests, however, have produced mixed results. As noted above, some of the initial studies on this topic found no effect of divided attention on perceptual priming despite robust effects on explicit memory (e.g., Mulligan & Hartman, 1996;Russo & Parkin, 1993). For example, in Mulligan and Hartman (1996), study words were presented visually under one of two conditions. In the full attention (FA) condition, th...

Event-related potential (ERP) correlates of memory blocking and priming during a word fragment test

“…For example, the MBE magnitude is unaffected by encoding depth, extended duration of fragment presentation, or inclusion of very specific instructions to avoid the influence of blocking words (Landau and Leynes, 2006;Leynes et al, 2008;Logan and Balota, 2003;Smith and Tindell, 1997). Kinoshita and Towgood (2001) argued that explicit memory mechanisms underlie blocking because dividing attention at study reduced MBE magnitude; however, this result is not clear evidence against the working hypothesis that implicit memory contributes to the MBE because divided attention can impair both explicit and implicit task performance (Mulligan et al, 2007). Consequently, additional evidence regarding blocking mechanisms is needed to fully resolve this issue.…”

Effects of divided attention in the word-fragment completion task with unique and multiple solutions

“…Similar results were obtained by Mulligan (2002Mulligan ( , 2003; see also Mulligan & Hornstein, 2000) with the perceptual identification task. Convergent results in the auditory modality were achieved by Mulligan, Duke, and Cooper (2007): They showed that a distractor task with high response frequency disrupted priming on the auditory versions of perceptual identification, word-stem, and word-fragment completion tasks. Finally, Mulligan and Peterson (2008) demonstrated that even the lexical decision (which had previously showed a strong resilience to attentional manipulations; Szymanski & MacLeod, 1996) was impaired by a modified version of the Stroop task, in which the attention was manipulated across distinct objects rather than within the same words (e.g., participants were requested to do colour judgements about Xs flanking the words).…”

Effects of Divided Attention at Retrieval on Conceptual Implicit Memory

“…We also used distracting tasks that required frequent rather than occasional responding and paid careful attention to the timing of distracting and implicit memory test stimuli. Response frequency and timing of tasks are both factors that are known to modulate DA effects on priming in some implicit memory tasks ( Mulligan, 2003 ; Mulligan et al, 2007 ). Despite those design features, there was no hint of a DA effect across two experiments, at least when the full samples in both experiments were considered.…”

“…1 Lozito and Mulligan (2010) used a variety of distracting tasks and multiple implicit memory tasks such as perceptual identification, word-stem completion, and category exemplar generation (CEG) to investigate retrieval-phase DA effects on implicit memory. Priming was unaffected in every case, regardless of whether distracting tasks required frequent or occasional responses (which can sometimes determine whether encoding-phase DA effects occur for implicit memory; see Mulligan, 2003 ; Mulligan et al, 2007 ), and regardless of whether distracting task materials overlapped with the implicit memory tasks. Together, these studies provide good support for the automaticity hypothesis, and they join additional studies that have reported little or no effect of retrieval-phase DA on other automatic uses of memory such as artificial grammar learning, false fame, or estimates of familiarity in recognition ( Jacoby et al, 1989 ; Jacoby, 1991 ; Helman and Berry, 2003 ).…”