Long-term memory
Are the links between our actions and their effects stored consciously?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When people first learn which action produces which effect, that knowledge relies mainly on conscious (explicit) memory rather than automatic (implicit) memory.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Four online experiments: learning phase producing object images by key presses, then inclusion vs exclusion test; manipulated incidental vs intentional learning (Exp 2) and full vs divided attention (Exps 3-4); MPT models estimate explicit and implicit memory
- N
- Separate samples per experiment: Exp 1 N = 78, Exp 2 N = 193, Exp 3 N = 165, Exp 4 N = 64 (final samples after exclusions)
- Population
- English-speaking adult online participants recruited via Prolific
- Outcome
- Proportion of correct action repetitions (inclusion) or alternations (exclusion) at test, modelled as explicit (E) and implicit (I) memory parameters
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Key findings
Explicit memory contributed in every experiment and was larger than implicit memory; in Experiment 1, participants repeated the original action on .63 of inclusion trials and correctly alternated on .61 of exclusion trials. Being told to memorise the pairings increased explicit memory, and dividing attention during learning reduced it (e.g. inclusion accuracy fell from .85 to .58 in Experiment 3). Clear evidence of an implicit memory contribution appeared in only one experiment, and even there it was much smaller than the explicit contribution.
Methodology
Participants pressed a left or right key to make pictures of everyday objects appear, experiencing each action-picture pairing three times. At test they saw the pictures again and either had to repeat the original key (inclusion) or deliberately press the other key (exclusion), which pits conscious recollection against automatic habits. Across four experiments the researchers also varied whether learning was incidental or intentional and whether attention was divided by a listening task, and used multinomial processing tree models to estimate separate explicit and implicit memory contributions.
Limitations
Each pairing was experienced only three times, so the findings describe early learning; implicit memory may grow with many more repetitions, as in classic ideomotor studies. The actions were simple key presses in an online task, which may not capture complex real-world actions. The implicit-memory finding from Experiment 2 was not replicated in Experiments 3 and 4, and the test was unspeeded, so fast automatic tendencies could have been overridden. The final sample in Experiment 4 was relatively small.
How this study connects
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