The Impact Of Awareness At Retrieval On The Retrieval-DA Effect Of Implicit Memory

Implicit memory typically refers to an unintentional form of memory retrieval and can be proved by priming,which is indicated by a faster response or greater accuracy for study relative to new stimuli,even when the retrieval task does not mention the prior study episodes.Many researchers have mostly regarded implicit memory as an automatic processing that is unaffected by attention resources,since implicit memory performance is unaffected by divided attention(DA)at encoding.However,when performing a distracting unrelated task during retrieval(retrieval-DA),researchers found that the priming effect was significantly reduced or abolished which is called “the retrieval-DA effect”.However,several studies which explore the " the retrieval-DA effect " have not reached the same results.For example,Prull et al.(2016)set two different types of distracting tasks which based on the perceptual and the semantic processing of words in the test phase and they found that the priming effect in the category example generation test was not disrupted by the retrieval-DA.Interestingly,after screening and excluding the participants who developed study-test awareness and adopted extraction strategies through the post questionnaire,they found that the result was completely different from their original conclusion.It seemed to imply that the study-test awareness at retrieval has a certain moderating effect on the relationship between the retrieval-DA and priming from some extent.Although all implicit tests didn’t require participants to actively recall what they have learned,there is no guarantee that participants will not produce “involuntary unconscious memory”(Richardson-Klavehn & Gardiner,1995),that is,the participants didn’t recall but were able to spontaneously realize past events.Several studies have shown that if participants develop study-test awareness,then the subsequent priming effect will be enhanced.And a study exploring encoding-DA and implicit memory also suggested that the participants’ awareness moderated the impact of interference on the priming effect.What’s more,a lot of evidences showed that participants’ performance of explicit memory test not affected by the distracting tasks during the retrieval phase,indicating that conscious extraction seems be "protected" and mandatory to some extent.Therefore,we speculated the awareness during retrieval might protect the priming effect in the implicit memory test,making it less susceptible to the destruction of interference at retrieval.Based on the above speculations,our study adopted a dual-task paradigm and manipulated the instructions to form awareness and the unawareness conditions in the test phase.We set up different test tasks in the three experiments to discuss the impact of awareness respectively when the implicit memory test is an identifiable-perceptual test(Experiment 1),an identifiable-conceptual test(Experiment 2),or a producibleconceptual test(Experiment 3).The results showed that the retrieval-DA effect is a relatively stable phenomenon,and the awareness at retrieval has little impact on the retrieval-DA effect of the implicit memory.