The effects of distinctiveness require reinstatement of organization: The importance of intentional memory instructions

The combined influences of organizational and distinctive processing offer one framework for understanding the impressive accuracy of memory (Hunt & M cDaniel, 1993). An important implication of this framework is that distinct ive 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 m anipulation of distinctive processing, judgment of differences among highly similar items, on explicit and implicit memory tests. Performance on expli cit tests of cued recall showed the expected advantage of difference judgme nts, whereas the manipulation affected implicit tests of word association a nd 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 al so offer some insight into the dissociation among conceptually driven impli cit tests. (C) 2000 Academic Press.