The Effect Of Interference At Retrieval On Conceptual Implicit Memory

Some previous studies have shown that implicit memory retrieval is not completely automated,but is subject to adjustment of attentional resources,and therefore will be affected by interference under certain conditions.In general,however,the implicit tests used in these studies are lexical decision tasks.As a consequence,it is not clear whether the phenomenon that implicit memory retrieval is impacted by interference task is universal or based on specific task.In order to explore the above issues,this study adopts a classic study-to-test paradigm to examine the relationship between interference and memory by setting up interference tasks in the retrieval phase.Three experiments were designed.In the first experiment,whether interference task during retrieval could affect perceptual implicit memory was investigated.Then,the second experiment further examined whether interference task could also change the priming of conceptual implicit retrieval.Last,the relationship between interference and explicit memory was explored in the third experirment.It was shown that,first,both perceptual priming and conceptual priming would be impacted by interference task.Second,the overlap of encoding and retrieval processing could impact the relationship of interference and implicit retrieval.Third,we also examined interference task costs and only found global costs occurred among experiment I and experiment 2.But no significant specific costs indicated that implicit retrieval seemingly had little impact on interference task,but was easily influenced by interference task.In addition,this effect would not be affected by awareness of retrieval.