Divided attention and memory, are all secondary tasks the same?

grantor: University of TorontoThe series of divided attention experiments presented in this paper show that free recall of words from long term memory is neither an automatic nor obligatory process, and is subject to large interference effects from a secondary task performed at retrieval. Experiment 1 employed a running recognition secondary task that involved identifying repeated words within a visually presented list. Words were repeated either shortly after initial presentation (2-3 intervening words) or after a longer delay (10-11 intervening words). When either of these tasks was performed concurrently with retrieval, a substantial decline in oral recall of a primary task word list occurred. Experiment 1a and 1b also showed that demanding participants to make a cognitive and manual response for each item in the secondary task affected the amount of interference produced at retrieval, which supports the response selection/retrieval bottleneck (Carrier and Pashier, 1995) over the parallel retrieval hypothesis (Baddeley et. al., 1984). Using a word-monitoring task, Experiment 2 showed that the need to process verbal material for the secondary task also affects the magnitude of the interference effect. Furthermore, the magnitude of the effect was not influenced by the level of processing required for the secondary task. That is, a word-monitoring task that involved semantic or phonological processing led to a 37% and 33% decline in recall performance respectively. The final experiment showed that word-monitoring tasks performed at the encoding stage of a word list led to a decline of approximately 50% in primary task recall performance. When compared to other published studies, these studies suggest that interference at retrieval is created only when the primary and secondary tasks utilize the same code or underlying representation.M.A