Experimental Study On The Impact Of Implicit Memory Inflicited By Ego Depletion

Making respond to the environment is can be done by any living body,but only human can damp the impulse of instinct and make flexible response to the changing external environment.The quality that distinguishes human being and other organism is self-regulation. Self-regulation ability is the core ability that the individual must have for working ans studying. However,self-regulation ability can not be uesed by will. Today, people are faced with many social problems, such as addiction, alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, etc.,those problems are related to self regulation failure. Therefore, researchers’ interests gradually focus the psycholigical mechanism of individual’s failure of self-regulation.In these studies, Baumeister suggests “self loss” model,according this model, self-regulation depends on a limited number of energy, this energy is similar to the power of the human body muscle, after use will quickly diminish,therefore, lead to the failure self-regulation in new task.This model assumes that, self depletion whether happens is mainly affected by the task that is doing but not how difficult the task is.In recent years, some researchers found that, besides self-regulation task, the normal operation of the executive such limited energy, which means that the self energy consumption will interfere with the normal operation of the executive function.In the current cognitive psychology research field, research has shown that in the condition of ego depletion, individual implicit learning ability will be disturbed. Because implicit learning and implicit memory have intimate relationship, therefore, will self depletion also influence implict memory? This study attempts to explore self depletion and its relationship with individual’s implicit memory, and provides experimental evidence.This study on the theoretical framework of self control resource model, by using behavioral experiment to study the effect on implicit memory that selt depletion exerts. Experiment 1 explore whether stroop task can induce selt depletion, 39 college students were randomly assigned into the experimental group and control group, respectively, complete color- word stroop task conflict and color- word stroop task. It was found that the color- word conflict stroop task can induce paticipants’ self depletion, reflects by longer reaction time, accuracy drops, negative emotions increase, etc.; Experiment 2 investigate whether subjects’ implicit memory is affected, 39 subjects participated this experiment, adopt the method of quick word recognition to evaluate subjects’ implicit memory performance. Results: word recognition accuracy in self depletion group is significant lower than control group, suggesting that self depletion have negative effects on subjects’ implicit memory.