اثرات نسلی بر روی حافظه ضمنی مفهومی

The generation effect has been central to theoretical analyses of implicit memory and has been used as a criterion for classifying implicit tests as conceptual. The present experiments demonstrate that generation does not always enhance conceptual implicit memory. Four experiments examined the effects of generation on conceptual implicit and explicit memory in category-exemplar production and category-cued recall, respectively. Two nonsemantic generation tasks, letter transposition and word-fragment generation, affected recall but not conceptual priming, dissociating performance on the two conceptual tests. A semantic generation task, however, enhanced both recall and priming. Finally, the letter-transposition task enhanced conceptual priming when categorical information was salient at encoding (in study lists blocked by category) but not when categorical information was nonobvious (in randomly ordered study lists). These results help delineate conditions under which generation effects are obtained in conceptual priming and are discussed in terms of the item-specific–relational distinction (Hunt & McDaniel, 1993).

The principles that govern implicit and explicit memory appear to differ in a number of ways, as reflected by a variety of population, pharmacological, and functional dissociations (Roediger & McDermott, 1993; Schacter, 1987; Tulving & Craik, 2000). Most important for present purposes are the functional dissociations produced when experimental manipulations exhibit different effects on implicit and explicit memory tests. For example, the levels-of-processing manipulation produces a marked effect on explicit memory, though it often has no significant effect on implicit tests (Roediger & McDermott, 1993; cf. Brown & Mitchell, 1994). Conversely, manipulations of the similarity of physical (or perceptual) features of the stimuli as presented at the time of study and test affect a number of implicit memory tests but have little or no effect on most explicit tests (see Roediger & McDermott, 1993, for review).