Implicit Memory and Inhibition

Abstract Should the declining influence of implicitly activated memories in cued recall be attributed to inhibition, interference, or decay? Subjects studied words having either small or large associative sets, and then they multiplied numbers or studied up to four interference lists before the test of first list recall. The interference lists contained either related or unrelated words. On immediate tests, words with smaller associative sets were more likely to be recalled than those with larger sets. On delayed tests, multiplying numbers eliminated set size effects whereas studying interference lists reduced these effects only slightly regardless of the relatedness of the interfering words. Priming the associates of a word can facilitate its recall and the declining influence of these associates over delays should be attributed to inhibition effects related to attention shifts rather than to interference or decay. Other findings indicated that inhibited associates could also be disinhibited by attention shifts. Implications for a model of implicit memory and for the negative priming literature are discussed.