| Description |
The focus of this research was to investigate the possible existence of an indirect inhibitory mechanism working on activated yet unattended information in long-term memory (LTM). There exists evidence in the cognition and memory literature, specifically the retrieval-induced forgetting and negative priming literature, as well as others, that suggests indirect inhibition may be acting to moderate activation levels in conjunction with semantic activation. Participants (n=120) were given a memory load of different category exemplars and were then instructed to either recall a given dominant category membership or a novel subordinate category membership. The novel category recall instruction required a reorganization of exemplar category associations and the hypothesized inhibition of dominant categories. Following recall, a series of category comparison frames presented new exemplars from the dominant categories of the memory load. Indirect inhibition of the dominant categories would be evidenced by longer response time (RT) on subordinate relative to dominant recall trials. RTs for the category comparisons associated with subordinate recall were not significantly different from the comparisons associated with dominant category recall. These data are incongruent with the hypothesis of an indirect inhibitory mechanism acting on activated yet unattended information in LTM. Instead, they are consistent with Cowan's (1999) model of working memory (WM) that posited active-but-unattended information in WM is subject to tome-based decay but not interference. |
