EXPERIMENT

An experiment to establish whether the level of processing effects word recollection



An experiment to establish whether the level of processing effects word recollection

Introduction

Level of processing affected recall from reading span, differed from Rose et al.'s (2010) finding that LoP did not affect recall on their novel LoP span task. Procedural differences between these tasks were likely responsible for the inconsistent results. These issues are discussed in detail in the General Discussion section, but one methodological difference between these tasks addressed in Experiment 2 concerns the extent to which the to-be-remembered items are integrated with the processing component of the span task. The reading span task used in Experiment 1 integrated the to-be-remembered items with the processing task, which likely provided rich semantic retrieval cues for recall both immediately and after a delay. Indeed, in their “user's guide” to WM span tasks, Conway et al. (2005) suggested that if the to-be-remembered items are not integrated with the processing task, then participants will be less able to use the sentence stems strategically to retrieve the items.

Another research examined LoP effects on a typical WM task—operation span—that does not integrate the to-be-remembered items within the processing task and therefore does not provide rich semantic cues at retrieval. If there is no LoP effect for immediate recall from operation span, then this would suggest that the LoP effect found for reading span was likely due to the provision of semantic cues. Alternatively, if the LoP effect found for reading span in Experiment 1 were to be replicated using operation span , then it would provide strong support for the proposal that complex span tasks require retrieval from SM (Unsworth & Engle, 2007).

Although the finding of an LoP effect in immediate recall in the present study differed from the null LoP effect of Rose et al. (2010), this is likely the result of differences in task demands and the types of cues available in the two studies. On the LoP span task, for example, to-be-remembered items were required to be read aloud, which may have resulted in a reliance on phonological cues for immediate retrieval. Furthermore, the correct answer for the processing decisions in the LoP span task often shared two associations with the to-be-remembered items, which could have caused interference on many levels (e.g., semantic, phonological). The processing decisions may have also been too easy to disrupt maintenance in WM. Indeed, the response times for the processing components of the tasks in the present study were two to four times longer than on the LoP span task. To the extent that processing times are a proxy for difficulty, which may decrease cognitive load and allow increased time devoted to maintaining to-be-remembered items (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004), it is possible that the LoP span task did not disrupt maintenance to the same extent as reading or operation span. As a result, it is possible that the to-be-remembered items were not completely displaced from PM in the LoP span ...