Is there implicit memory without attention? A reexamination of task demands in Eich's (1984) procedure.
The relation between memory and attention has been of long-standing interest. Eich (1984) made an important discovery of implicit but not explicit memory for contextually determined homophones (e.g., taxi-FARE) presented in a channel to be ignored within a selective listening procedure. However, his slow rate of presentation of shadowing task materials may have allowed frequent attention shifts to the allegedly ignored channel. With a direct replication of Eich's timing parameters, we reproduced his results, but when the attended channel was presented twice as fast as Eich's, implicit memory for the to-be-ignored words vanished. Our results contradict claims of extensive semantic processing of unattended auditory information in this task.
Wood
N L
NL
Department of Psychology, University of Missouri, Columbia 65211, USA.
Stadler
M A
MA
Cowan
N
N
D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D012016:Reference Values