ARTICLE NO. CC970300 Constraints on Awareness, Attention, Processing, and Memory: Some Recent Investigations with Ignored Speech

We discuss potential benefits of research in which attention is directed toward or away from a spoken channel and measures of the allocation of attention are used. This type of research is relevant to at least two basic, still-unresolved issues in cognitive psychology: (a) the extent to which unattended information is processed and (b) the extent to which unattended information that is processed can later be remembered. Four recent studies of this type that address these questions in various ways (Cowan, Lichty, & Grove, 1990; Wood & Cowan, 1995a,b; Wood, Stadler & Cowan, in press) are reviewed as illustrations. We conclude from these studies that (a) unattended information appears to be partially processed automatically, though attention enhances the processing considerably, and (b) the unattended information that is processed may not be retrievable in direct or many indirect memory tasks, though it remains possible that there is an automatically stored memory trace (e.g., one that could produce semantic priming). 1997 Academic Press The modern era of cognitive psychological research has lasted about 40 years. During that period, many topics have been explored, but from time to time investiga-tors have returned to a few central questions that remain unanswered. One of the most important of these concerns the effects of attending to a stimulus to the point of becoming aware of it. One can ask, more specifically, to what extent attention and awareness affect (a) processing of the stimulus and (b) memory of the stimulus. The specific issues of processing and memory often have been confounded because memory measures have been used to indicate awareness and processing. To separate these issues, both immediate and delayed indices are needed. In this paper, we review several of our recent studies of the processing and memory of attended and ignored stimuli, which include both immediate and delayed indices of processing (Cowan