Investigation of automatic and recollective memory in phonological association

Abstract

Two experiments manipulated the study variables associative pairing, attention, and modality, in an attempt to produce process dissociations (Jacoby, 1991) between estimates of recollective and automatic memory in a rhyme-based cued-recall task with university students. The experiments examined possible inferences drawn from earlier research with amnesiac subjects (Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1982) which implied that phonological association can occur in automatic or implicit memory as well as recollective or explicit memory. Experiment 1 found that manipulations of attention and study context affected estimates (cf. Jacoby, 1991) of recollective but not automatic phonological association. Experiment 2 replicated the effect of study context on estimates of recollective but not automatic memory and in addition found that manipulations of modality (and repetition) affected some estimates of automatic but had no effect on estimates of recollective phonological association. As found previously (see Jacoby & Dallas, 1981), Experiment 2 found that increasing the number of study presentations increased estimates of both recollective and automatic memory. Combined across the two experiments there appeared to be separate factors affecting recollective and automatic memory, but the evidence for automatic memory of phonological association was mixed.