ATTENTION IN DIRECT AND INDIRECT MEMORY TASKS WITH SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM PROBES

In two experiments, college students verified the answers to addition problems as their primary task while simultaneously viewing a word or nonword. The degree of attention allocated to the verbal stimulus vari ed depending on the difficulty of the problem and the instructions giv en. After each problem, a test probe assessed either a direct test of recognition memory or an indirect test of repetition priming in lexica l decision at lags of 0, 1, or 8 intervening trials. The degree of att ention at encoding and lag strongly affected recognition sensitivity ( d'), but only lag affected recognition latencies. The repetition-primi ng effect neither declined with lag nor varied with the degree of atte ntion. The degree of attention at encoding thus affects direct and ind irect test performance differentially, a finding consistent with the d istinction between explicit and implicit systems of long-term memory.