Abstract
This study investigated whether conceptual implicit memory is sensitive to process-specific interference at the time of retrieval. Participants performed the implicit memory test of category exemplar generation (CEG; Experiments 1 and 3), or the matched explicit memory test of category-cued recall (Experiment 2), both of which are conceptually driven memory tasks, under one of two divided attention (DA) conditions in which participants simultaneously performed a distracting task. The distracting task was either syllable judgments (dissimilar processes), or semantic judgments (similar processes) on unrelated words. Compared to full attention (FA) in which no distracting task was performed, DA had no effect on CEG priming overall, but reduced category-cued recall similarly regardless of distractor task. Analyses of distractor task performance also revealed differences between implicit and explicit memory retrieval. The evidence suggests that, whereas explicit memory retrieval requires attentional resources and is disrupted by semantic and phonological distracting tasks, conceptual implicit memory is automatic and unaffected even when distractor and memory tasks involve similar processes.
Highlights
When we retrieve information from memory, we often do so in the context of an ongoing activity
Fernandes and Guild (2009) have argued that process-specific divided attention (DA) effects can occur in explicit memory, in which memory performance diminishes when both memory and distractor tasks compete for the same set of processes at the time of retrieval
The overarching goal of the present study was to determine whether conceptual implicit memory was sensitive to DA at retrieval
Summary
When we retrieve information from memory, we often do so in the context of an ongoing activity. Using a procedure in which participants perform a distracting or secondary task simultaneously while encoding new information, researchers have shown that performance on explicit memory tests of recall or recognition is sharply reduced compared to a FA condition in which attention is not diverted at encoding In these studies, virtually any distracting task has a negative effect on memory (Murdock, 1965; Baddeley et al, 1984; Fisk and Schneider, 1984; Craik et al, 1996; Anderson et al, 1998; Naveh-Benjamin et al, 1998, 2000; see Mulligan, 2008, for a review)
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