Although much research has been done on how well working memory predicts processing of consciously activated information, research on the possible influences of working memory on automatically activated information is scarce (Barrett, Tugade, & Engle, 2004). Working memory capacity (WMC) may be related to how much information is activated automatically by either aiding ease of access to relevant information or by its role in inhibiting irrelevant thoughts and information (i.e., noise). The purpose of the present study was to examine the contribution of individual differences in WMC on implicit and explicit processes in cued recall. Participants studied target words and recall was cued by associatively related words. Target connectivity was varied in Experiment 1 and target set size was varied in Experiment 2. The cued recall memory test was conducted after various retention intervals (0, 10 and 20 mins). In addition, memory span of all participants was measured with both operation and counting span tasks. Finally, all participants studied a second list of words under divided attention instructions. The present experiments examined 1) the influence of retention interval on cued recall performance, 2) the influence of individual differences in WMC on cued recall after various retention intervals and 3) the role of WMC and divided attention on implicitly activated knowledge (i.e., connectivity and set size effects). The findings revealed that working memory is related to intentional (explicit) types of processes, but not related to implicit processes outside of a person's awareness. WMC also interacted with retention interval. This finding is compatible with an attentional interpretation of WMC that assumes the high span advantage is apparent only when there is interference. Surprisingly, low span participants tended to outperform high span individuals on an immediate test. These findings are explained by differences in maintenance of information and rehearsal, and retrieval strategies.

Syftet med studien var att studera effekten av priming vid ordstamskomplettering. Mina frågeställningar var 1) har priming en effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar? 2) är en svarstid på fyra sekunder för kort för kompletterandet av en ordstam? 3) kompletteras ordstammarna med det första ordet försökspersonerna kommer på? För att besvara mina frågeställningar utförde jag ett experiment. Den oberoende variabeln var priming eller inte priming av sammansatta ord, och den beroende variabeln var antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar. Svarstiden var fyra sekunder och antalet ordstammar var 226. Efteråt ställde jag dem frågor om hur de gått tillväga när de svarat. Antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar var signifikant högre för de sammansatta ord som försökspersonerna hade primats på (p<.001), vilket visar att priming har effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar, samt att hela ord kan användas som ordstam. En svarstid på fyra sekunder korrelerade inte med ett stort antal missade svar (M = 9, SD = 4), vilket visar att en svarstid på fyra sekunder inte är för kort. Enligt försökspersonerna svarade de, på i snitt 4% av ordstammarna (M = 10, SD = 9), inte med det första ordet de kom på, vilket antyder om att ordstammar nästan uteslutande kompletteras med det första ordet försökspersoner kommer på. / The purpose of the study was to examine if priming has an effect on word stem completion. The questions I wanted to answer was 1) does priming have an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words? 2) is a response time of four seconds too short for the completion of a word stem? 3) are the word stems completed with the first word that comes to the subject’s minds? To answer my questions, I performed an experiment. The independent variable was priming or not priming of compound words, and the dependent variable was the number of correctly completed word stems. The response time was four seconds and the number of word stems was 226. Afterwards I asked them questions about how they did when they answered. The number of correctly completed word stems was significantly higher for the compound words that the subjects had been primed for (p<.001), which shows that priming has an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words, and that a whole word can be used as a word stem. A response time of four seconds did not correlate with a big number of missed answers (M= 9, SD = 4), which shows that a response time of four seconds is not too short. According to the subjects they, on an average of 4% of the word stems (M = 10, SD = 9), did not answer with the first word that came to mind, which suggests that word stems almost exclusively are completed with the first word that comes to subject’s minds.

No description available.

Virtual reality applications are developing fast and break new grounds every day in new industries. In today's market, most of the virtual reality projects are funded by venture capitalists and are yet to produce any revenue. For an advertiser to be willing to advertise they must see some sort of value or possibility to receive revenue out of the intended commercial. Memory is a common measure of influence from a commercial. Therefore, this thesis aim was to investigate if the memory, in terms of implicit and explicit memory, was affected by objects with different levels of interaction in virtual reality. A user study was conducted where the participants were instructed to go through several virtual rooms, where they were exposed to static, semiinteractive and interactive objects in the categories fruits/vegetables and beverage cans. The static objects were presented as pictures on instruction boards, the semi-interactive objects were presented through point-and-click tasks, and the interactive objects were presented through tasks that utilized body movements in virtual reality.When the participants were finished with the virtual reality application, they conducted a survey regarding their experiences and was asked to fill out three memory tests; a word-fragment completion task, a cued recall test, and a recognition task. Results show that interactive and semi-interactive objects in virtual reality did have a significant impact on explicit memory, and that the static objects did not. For implicit memory a conclusion could not be drawn whether the objects in the virtual environment had any impact due to no significant difference between the study participants and the control group without influence of the study as a result of not enough data. The results from the study were vastly different for fruits/vegetables and beverage brands, where results for the fruits/vegetables had a clear distinction and the beverage brands had almost no significant data, which could be due to “Inattentional blindness”. / Virtuella verklighets (Virtual reality) applikationer utvecklas snabbt och bryter ny mark varje dag i nya industrier. På dagens marknad, så är de flesta virtuella verklighets projekten finansierade av riskkapitalister och är fortfarande i ett läge där de inte producerar intäkt. For att marknadsförare ska vara villiga att investera måste de se någon potential i att få intäkter från den avsedda reklamen. Minne, är ett vanligt mått för att mäta påverkan av en reklam. Därav var avsikten for denna avhandling att undersöka om minnet, i form av implicit och explicit minne, blev påverkat av objekt med olika nivåer av interaktion i en virtuell verklighet. Ett användartest utfördes där deltagare blev instruerade att gå genom flera virtuella rum, där de blev exponerade för statiska, semi-interaktiva och interaktiva objekt i kategorierna frukter/grönsaker och dryckesmärken. De statiska objekten representerades som bilder på en statisk instruktionstavla, dom semi-interaktiva objekten representerades genom en peka-ochklicka uppgift, och de interaktiva objekten var representerade genom uppgifter som utnyttjade kroppsrörelser i en virtuell verklighet.När deltagarna fullföljt den virtuella verklighets applikationen fick de fylla i en enkät angående deras upplevelser, samt fylla i tre minnes test; ett ord-fragmentkompletterings test, ett indikation återkallelsetest, och ett igenkännings test. Resultaten visar på att de interaktiva och de semi-interaktiva objekten i den virtuella verkligheten hade en signifikant påverkan på det explicita minnet, samt att de statiska inte hade det. För de implicita minnet kunde inga slutsatser dras huruvida objekten i den virtuella verkligheten hade någon inverkan på grund av ingen signifikant skillnad mellan studiedeltagarna och kontrollgruppens resultat som en efterföljd av otillräckliga data. Resultaten från studien hade olika utfall för frukter/grönsaker och dryckesmärken, där resultaten för frukter/grönsaker hade en klar distinktion, medan dryckesmärkena hade nästan ingen signifikant data, vilket kan bero på ”Ouppmärksam blindhet” (Inattentional blindness).

The mere exposure effect, positive affect elicited by exposure to a previously unfamiliar stimulus, is considered one of the most well established findings in the psychological literature. Yet its mechanism remains unknown. In Experiments 1 - 5, memory encoding was examined to determine whether the mere exposure effect was a form of conceptual or perceptual implicit priming, and, if not either, whether cardiovascular psychophysiology could reveal its nature. Experiment 1 examined the effects of study phase level of processing on recognition, the mere exposure effect, and word identification implicit priming. Deep relative to shallow processing improved recognition, but did not influence the mere exposure effect or word identification implicit priming. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the effect of study-test changes in font and orientation, respectively, on the mere exposure effect and word identification implicit priming. Different study-test font and orientation reduced word identification implicit priming, but had no influence on the mere exposure effect. The combined results from Experiments 1-3 suggested that conceptual and perceptual processing do not drive the mere exposure effect. Experiments 4 and 5 developed and used, respectively, an innovative cardiovascular psychophysiological implicit priming paradigm to examine whether stimulus-specific cardiovascular reactivity at study predicted the mere exposure effect at test. At encoding, stimulus-specific peripheral vasodilatation had predictive value for the mere exposure effect, but not for word identification implicit priming. Experiments 6 and 7 examined whether sustained or transitory anxiety (i.e., trait or state, respectively) would influence the mere exposure effect. Greater trait and state anxiety reduced the mere exposure effect. Together, the findings from these experiments (N = 362) identify a novel affective mechanism of implicit priming that is influenced by cardiovascular psychophysiology and variations in trait and state anxiety.

<p dir="ltr">It is well known that persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate deficits in sentence processing. Specifically, many show difficulties with syntactic re-analysis, or the ability to revise one’s interpretation of a sentence due to a temporary ambiguity. Emerging evidence suggests that structural priming, individuals’ tendency to unconsciously re-use a previously encountered structure, can facilitate production and comprehension of different sentence structures in PWA. However, there are inconsistencies within the literature regarding the robustness of priming across different sentence structures and tasks, and the existing findings are limited to off-line measures which do not capture real-time sentence processing. Furthermore, a range of individual variability has been shown in magnitudes of priming effects.</p><p dir="ltr">This current project addressed these critical gaps by investigating the effects of structural priming on comprehension of sentences with reduced relative (RR) clauses. Study 1 examined whether PWA show immediate structural priming and longer-term cumulative priming in a computerized self-paced reading paradigm. In this study, participants read RR target sentences that were preceded by prime sentences with either an RR or a main clause (MC) interpretation. Study 2 examined if and how individuals’ cognitive (memory) skills account for individual variability shown in structural priming. Participants completed a Serial Reaction Time task as a measure of implicit memory, and the Verbal Paired Associates I task as a measure of explicit memory. Eighteen healthy adults (HA) and 18 PWA participated in both studies.</p><p dir="ltr">In Study 1, PWA demonstrated robust and timely immediate structural priming effect, providing novel evidence that structural priming can be captured in real-time using self-paced reading, and that priming can help ameliorate syntactic re-analysis deficits in PWA. However, these online changes were not reflected in the behavioral measures, highlighting the sensitivity of self-paced reading in detecting the dissociation between automatic, real-time processing and overt behavioral responses. Cumulative priming as traditionally defined was also not significant for either group, although participants became faster at reading RR target sentences as the session progressed. Study 2’s findings suggest that implicit memory may be an important cognitive skill to promote sentence processing, whereas having strong explicit memory may not be facilitative of the learning process.</p>

No description available.

Over the last 30 or more years evidence has accumulated in favour of the view that memory is not a unitary faculty; rather, it can be subdivided into a num- ber of functionally independent subsystems. Whilst dividing memory phenomena into these distinct subsystems has undoubtedly advanced our understanding of memory as a whole, the approach of studying subsystems in isolation fails to address potential interactions between them. Over the last few decades there has been a gradual increase in the number of studies attempting to move be- yond dissociation by characterising functional interactions between subsystems of memory. The main aim of this thesis was to contribute to this endeavour, by examining interactions between two specific subsystems that are positioned on opposite sides of the declarative and non-declarative divide in long-term mem- ory: priming and episodic recognition. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were employed to monitor neural markers of repetition priming and episodic memory during recognition tests with masked priming of test cues. In the standard pro- cedure, half of the studied and unstudied test trials began with a brief (48ms) masked repetition of the to-be-recognized word prior to the onset of test items; the remaining unprimed trials were preceded by the word “blank”. The pattern of priming effects across experiments was reasonably consistent, with differences between experiments directly related to the intended manipulations. In contrast to priming effects, the pattern of memory effects was variable across experiments, demonstrating that the engagement of explicit recognition signals is influenced by the outcome of implicit processing, and suggesting that interactions between priming and explicit retrieval processes do occur. Taken together, results from experiments reported in this thesis indicate (1) that under certain circumstances, priming is sufficient to support accurate recognition and does not necessitate changes in memory performance, (2) that mid-frontal old/new effects indexing familiarity are not merely driven by repeated access to semantic information, and (3) that priming influences neural correlates of recollection by speeding their onset. Overall, the data clearly demonstrate that there are multiple potentially interacting routes to recognition.

<p>The artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm has been intensively researched since the 60-s. In general, these investigations attempt to study the implicit acquisition of structural regularities. Among other things, it has been suggested that the AGL paradigm can serve as a model for the process of acquiring a natural language. Thus it can serve as a well-controlled laboratory task that might be used to understand certain aspects of the process of language acquisition. For example the AGL paradigm has been used in an attempt to isolate the acquisition of syntactic aspects of language. Several experimental studies show that the participants acquire knowledge of the underlying rule system since they are able to differentiate grammatical strings from non-grammatical ones. It has been argued that the traditionally conducted AGL paradigm with grammaticality instructions might make the task explicit, at least during the test phase. In order to imitate the language learning process as close as possible, to rule out the possibility of an explicit component during the testing phase (i.e., keeping the retrieval process implicit) and to rule out explicit rule conformity or rule following, we modified the classical AGL paradigm. In a behavioural study we combined the AGL paradigm with an altered mere exposure paradigm in an attempt to better model aspects of language acquisition. We were able to show that subjects, classifying under mere exposure instructions, categorize grammatical and non-grammatical strings just as well as those solving the classification task with the grammaticality instructions. This indicates that the mere exposure version might serve as a more appropriate model for language acquisition.</p>

<p>Researchers have recently combined clinical and cognitive areas of research in order to investigate the role of cognitive factors in explaining how emotional disorders are developed and maintained. It is believed that biased cognitive processing of emotionally relevant information can greatly affect emotional responses and behaviour where insights into such cognitive processes can have invaluable clinical implications.</p><p>The present thesis investigates the role of cognitive biases for information related to food and body appearance in individuals with eating disorders (ED) and those with non-clinically eating disorder-related concerns (NED). Are ED characterised by cognitive biases toward such information related to their specific concerns? Are such cognitive biases specific to clinical ED or present also in NED samples? Are cognitive biases operating at both conscious and unconscious levels of cognitive processing?</p><p>The tasks used to pursue these questions were: the emotional Stroop task, an Internet version of the emotional Stroop, Jacoby’s white noise paradigm and a recognition task. The influence of priming on the emotional Stroop task was also investigated in order to test whether the use of this task could be extended to more complex investigations than selective attention.</p><p>Results provide support for that cognitive processing of information related to eating and body appearance is biased in individuals with ED. It is, however, unclear whether such biased processing is specific to clinical ED. Findings further suggest that cognitive biases occur primarily at unconscious levels of cognitive processing. Support was also obtained for that the emotional Stroop task is sensitive to priming where initial body perception may be one factor influencing cognitive responses toward negative self referent words following exposure to thin ideal images. Results further suggest that the emotional Stroop task successfully can be administered via the Internet where manipulating task delivery and response mode may increase the sensitivity of this task. Some of the advantages of administering the emotional Stroop task via Internet over traditional methods are access to more heterogeneous samples, more ecologically valid situations, reduced costs and minimisation of demand characteristics.</p>