THE STOCHASTIC RELATION BETWEEN CONSCIOUS AND AUTOMATIC MEMORY PROCESSES - AN EXTENSION OF THE PROCESS DISSOCIATION PROCEDURE

This paper presents an extension of the process dissociation procedure with wordstem completion, allowing the measurement of the stochastic relation between conscious and automatic processes. The conditional pr obabilities of conscious remembering with and without automatic proces ses can be determined. The determination of these conditional probabil ities succeeds due to the extension of the process dissociation proced ure by an indirect wordstem completion test, without refering to the u sual assumptions of the dissociation paradigm. For the evaluation of t his extended process dissociation procedure a multinomial model is pre sented which allows the distinction between voluntary and involuntary conscious memory. The model is applied to a study by ourselves and to an experiment published by Toth, Reingold, and Jacoby (1994). The resu lts show that the assumptions of stochastic independence or redundancy as well as exclusivity of conscious and automatic processes are often violated. Two conscious processes with different probabilities of occ urrence are found; voluntary and involuntary conscious memory processe s.