Article –
Dual-mode presentation and its effect on implicit and explicit memory
Invitation to Psychology
explains the measure of memory in two terms: implicit and explicit.
Implicit memory
is the “unconscious retention in memory, as evidenced by the effect
of a previous experience or previously encountered information on
current thoughts or actions” and explicit memory
as a “conscious, intentional recollection of an event or of an item
of information” (273). These measures are explored in the article
“Dual-mode presentation and its effect on implicit and explicit
memory.” The authors, Prabu David and Elliot Hirshman, conduct
experiments in order to categorize the perceptual systems of
identification, such as auditory and visual.
Priming
is a term used liberally within the article. It is “a method for
measuring implicit memory in which a person reads or listens to
information and is later tested to see whether the information
affects performance on another type of task” (274). One experiment
tests different kinds of priming against each other: multimodal
priming (auditory-visual) against within-modality priming (visual)
and cross-modality priming (visual).
The
experiment consisted of a 3x2x2 design, including two within-subject
factors and one between-subject factors. The first w-s factor was the
modality; study words were presented in the auditory, visual, or
auditory-visual conditions. 360 words were divided into thirds (40)
and assigned to each group. The second w-s was the encoding
instruction, half semantically, half structurally. Within the groups
of 40, half were semantic, the other structural. The between-subject
was test instructions, half given implicit instructions, half given
explicit instructions.
Three
trials were performed: auditory, in which the word was presented
through headphones; visual, in which the words were presented on a
computer screen, and auditory-visual, in which the words were
presented on the screen and through the headphones. During each
trial, the subject had to encode the words. “Under semantic
encoding, when the study word was presented, the subject was cued to
'generate a sentence using the word.' Under structural encoding, the
subject was cued to 'generate a word that begins with the same first
letter as the word.' The subject moved to the next trial by pressing
the space bar” (81).
After
the study portion came the identification tests. The implicit
instruction asked the subject to identify the word after it was
flashed on the screen for a brief amount of time. The explicit
instruction asked the subject to identify the word after it flashed.
The difference is that under the implicit, the subject was not cued
as to whether or not some of the words were ones they had seen from
the study period. The explicit cued “old” for ones previously
seen and “new” for ones not included earlier. The subject was
meant to say the word out loud in order to identify it, and told to
say “Don't know” if unable to.
The
results of the experiment state that multimodal priming
(auditory-visual) is equal to within-modality priming (visual) and
that within-modality is greater than cross-modality priming
(auditory). These results match up with view “that there are small
but consistent effects of levels of processing on implicit memory
tasks” (82).
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