The Effect Of Interference At Retrieval On Implicit Memory

In the past three decades, implicit memory is much concerned in the field of cognitive psychology, which attracts the attention of many experts and scholars. Implicit memory refers to the unconscious retrieval about the information obtained previously. It corresponds to explicit memory, which reflects the conscious and purposeful recall about the past experience. There are many influencing factors on implicit memory, interference factors is the most important factors. Recently, a growing body of research has explored the effect of interference during memory encoding, and has come to the unanimous conclusion that encoding interference affects implicit memory. However, few researches have explored the role of interference during implicit retrieval, and the conclusion is also inconsistent.To further explore the role of interference during implicit retrieval, we conduct a research by the behavioral experiment and event-related potentials (ERP) experiment. In the experiments, we set up two kinds of interferential tasks:the perceptual interference and the conceptual interference, and introduce the variable the level of processing. The results of behavioral experiment show that the lexical decision task without interference exists significant priming effects. However, in the interference conditions, the priming effect is damaged. The perceptual interference retains the priming effect which comes from the deep processing, but the priming effect which comes from the low processing disappears. The conceptual interference destroys all effect. The behavior results of event-related synchronization are consistent with the previous behavior experimental results. ERP results show that have not found the ERP components about the priming effect of shallow processing in no interference condition, but there is N400effect which clearly represent implicit memory in the deep processing; however, in the interference conditions, ERPs have no significant differences between the old words and the new words.Over consideration, we believe that implicit memory has been influenced by the interference during the retrieval, and the effect is different between the type of interferential tasks, the extent of the damage comes from conceptual interference is greater than the perceptual interference.