Abstract
Long-term storage of attended and unattended material was investigated. College students performed mental arithmetic problems as a primary task. The difficulty of the primary task (easy, medium, and hard) was varied to control the degree of attention available for secondary words that were visually presented during the mental calculations. Interference, intention, and introspection criteria of attended-unattended processing were examined. Two operational definitions of the intention criterion were employed here because earlier results concerning this criterion were difficult to interpret. Following a retention interval of 5 minutes, participants were given a surprise recognition test on the secondary words. All three criteria indicated that the secondary words were attended to when students performed the easy priniary task and were unattended when they performed the medium and hard primary tasks. Attended words were recognized markedly better than unattended words. Even so, unattended words were recognized slightly better than would be expected by chance. The present research extends previous reports of unattended memory in showing the effect occurs for verbal as well as pictorial stimuli and in providing unambiguous evidence concerning the intention criterion.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ALLPORT, D. A., ANTONIS, B., & REYNOLDS, P. (1972). On the division of attention: A disproof of the single channel hypothesis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 24, 225–235.
CRAIK, F. I. M., & LOCKHART, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671–684.
DIXON, N. F. (1981). Preconscious processing. New York: Wiley.
EICH, E. (1984). Memory for unattended events: Remembering with and without awareness. Memory & Cognition, 12, 105–111.
FISK, A. D., & SCHNEIDER, W. (1984). Memory as a function of attention, level of processing, and automatization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 181–197.
JENKINS, J. J. (1979). Four points to remember: A tetrahedral model of memory experiments. In L. S. Cermak & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.). Levels of processing in human memory. Hillsboro, NJ: Erlbaum.
KELLOGG, R. T. (1980). Is conscious attention necessary for long-term memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 379–390.
KELLOGG, R. T., COCKLIN, T., & BOURNE, L. E., Jr. (1982). Conscious attentional demands of encoding and retrieval from long-term memory. American Journal of Psychology, 95, 183–198.
MORAY, N. (1959). Attention in dichotic listening: Affective cues and the influence of instructions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11, 56–60.
NORMAN, D. A. (1969). Memory while shadowing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 21, 85–93.
ROLLLINS, H. A., & THIBADEAU, R. (1973). The effects of auditory shadowing on recognition of information received visually. Memory & Cognition, 1, 164–168.
SEAMON, J. G., MARSH, R. L., & BRODY, N. (1984). Critical importance of exposure duration for affective discrimination of stimuli that are not recognized. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 465–469.
SILVERMAN, Lloyd H. (1983). The subliminal psychodynamic activation method: Overview and comprehensive listing of studies. In J. Nasling (Ed.), Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theory (Vol. 1). Hillsboro, NJ: Erlbaum.
TOGLIA, M. P., BATTIG, W. F., BARROW, K., CARTWRIGHT, D. S., POSNANSKY, C. J., PELLEGRINO, J. W., MOORE, T. J., & CAMILLI, G. S. (1978). Handbook of semantic word norms. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kellogg, R.T. Long-Term Memory of Unattended Information. Psychol Rec 35, 239–249 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03394930
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03394930