Long-Term Memory of Unattended Information

Abstract

Long-term storage of attended and unattended material was investigated. College students performed mental arithmetic problems as a primary task. The difficulty of the primary task (easy, medium, and hard) was varied to control the degree of attention available for secondary words that were visually presented during the mental calculations. Interference, intention, and introspection criteria of attended-unattended processing were examined. Two operational definitions of the intention criterion were employed here because earlier results concerning this criterion were difficult to interpret. Following a retention interval of 5 minutes, participants were given a surprise recognition test on the secondary words. All three criteria indicated that the secondary words were attended to when students performed the easy priniary task and were unattended when they performed the medium and hard primary tasks. Attended words were recognized markedly better than unattended words. Even so, unattended words were recognized slightly better than would be expected by chance. The present research extends previous reports of unattended memory in showing the effect occurs for verbal as well as pictorial stimuli and in providing unambiguous evidence concerning the intention criterion.