LEVELS OF PROCESSING AND SELECTIVE ATTENTION EFFECTS ON ENCODING IN MEMORY

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of sel ective attention and levels of processing (LOPs) at study on long-term repetition priming vis-a-vis their effects on explicit recognition. I n a series of three experiments we found parallel effects of LOP and a ttention on long-term repetition priming and recognition performance w hen the manipulation of these factors at encoding was blocked. When a mixed study condition was used, both factors affected explicit recogni tion, while their effect on repetition priming was determined by the n ature of the test. Shallow processing at test did not benefit from lon g-term repetition, regardless of whether the words had been studied de eply or shallowly. Selective attention affected longterm repetition gr iming in a semantic: but not in a lexical decision (LD), test. Regardl ess of study condition, retention lag affected long-term repetition pr iming only in the semantic test. These results suggest that if the exp erimental conditions allow scrupulous selection of attended and unatte nded information or narrow tuning to a shallow, pre-lexical LOP, impli cit access to unattended or shallowly studied items is significantly r educed, as is explicit recognition. We suggest a conceptual framework for understanding the effects of LOP, attention, and retention interva l on performance of explicit and implicit tests of memory. (C) 1998 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.