The Effects of Distinctiveness Require Reinstatement of Organization: The Importance of Intentional Memory Instructions

✍ Scribed by Rebekah E Smith; R.Reed Hunt

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 79 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0749-596X
• DOI: 10.1006/jmla.2000.2707

✦ Synopsis

The combined influences of organizational and distinctive processing offer one framework for understanding the impressive accuracy of memory (Hunt & McDaniel, 1993). An important implication of this framework is that distinctive processes will be ineffectual in retrieval unless the original encoding context is reinstated. Intentional memory instructions at test are crucial to reinstatement of the original context. Two experiments are reported to test this prediction. Both experiments contrast the effects of a powerful manipulation of distinctive processing, judgment of differences among highly similar items, on explicit and implicit memory tests. Performance on explicit tests of cued recall showed the expected advantage of difference judgments, whereas the manipulation affected implicit tests of word association and category exemplar production only when subjects claimed awareness of the relationship between study and test. The results demonstrate the critical role of cues carried by intentional instructions at the time of test and also offer some insight into the dissociation among conceptually driven implicit tests.