The distinctiveness effect in the absence of conscious recollection: Evidence from conceptual priming☆

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Abstract

We tested whether the distinctiveness effect in memory (superior memory for isolated or unusual items) only occurs with conscious recollection or could emerge with recapitulation of the type of processing that occurred at study even in the absence of recollection at test. Participants studied lists of categorically isolated exemplars. In Experiment 1, participants received either an explicit or an implicit test of category verification. We hypothesized that this task would recapitulate the evaluative processing from study. Results showed better explicit category cued recognition as well as greater priming for isolated items than nonisolated items on a category verification test. The latter outcome suggests that the distinctiveness effect can occur in the absence of conscious recollection. In Experiment 2, we sought converging evidence for our hypothesis that reinstating the evaluative process is critical for obtaining the effect on the implicit test; we used another conceptual implicit memory test (category production) that contained matching test cues but did not require evaluative processing. The absence of a distinctiveness effect on this measure in conjunction with its presence on the implicit category verification measure suggests that evaluative processing mediates the distinctiveness effect.

Section snippets

The importance of context for distinctiveness

Much research shows that the effect of distinctiveness, or item difference, on memory depends critically on the encoding context (Hunt, 1995; Hunt & McDaniel, 1993; Hunt & Smith, 1996; Smith & Hunt, 2000). Echoing von Restorff's original findings, Hunt (1995) illustrates how the background context, and not simply item difference, produces the distinctiveness effect. The following example from Hunt (1995) illustrates this point.

Imagine that you are presented with a list of 9 numbers and one

The distinctiveness effect and implicit memory

Other researchers have similarly proposed that the distinctiveness effect can only be obtained on explicit, and not implicit, memory tests (Weldon & Coyote, 1996).1 Weldon and Coyote suggested that explicit memory tests benefit from intentional efforts to distinguish between studied and nonstudied information based on distinctive aspects of the studied

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 was designed to separate the contribution of conscious awareness and the match in conceptual processing at study and test by using an implicit test that recapitulates the evaluative process presumed to mediate this distinctiveness effect. In this study, distinctiveness was created using study lists that contained categorically isolated items. At test, participants were given an implicit test of category verification. We used this test to try to mimic the hypothesized evaluative

Experiment 2a

We interpret the results from Experiment 1 to suggest that the distinctiveness effect can be obtained on an implicit memory test if it recapitulates the exact evaluative processing engaged at the time of study. However, it is not clear whether the distinctiveness effect was obtained on this test because the test accessed category information alone, or because it required the same evaluative processing across study and test. In other words, it could be that simply cueing the general category

Experiment 2b

We attempted to increase priming in this experiment by using critical items of a lower frequency. In the previous experiment, all critical items were taken from the top 8 exemplars for a given category. We chose to use very good examples of the category in the previous experiment (e.g., the word table was the critical furniture item) to make the category manipulation salient so that the isolated items would appear clearly distinctive from the other category. However, in doing so, we might have

General discussion

Experiments 1 and 2 reported in this article used an isolation paradigm to test whether the distinctiveness effect depends on conscious reference to the study episode or may be observed even in the absence of conscious recollection by reinstating the specific evaluative processing from study, i.e., our evaluative-match hypothesis. To tease these two hypotheses apart, we used two different tests of conceptual implicit memory across two experiments to vary the specific processing demands.

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    ☆

    Parts of this research were supported by NIH Grant R29MH57345-01 given to S.R.

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