Debriefing


A person’s ability to remember a particular piece of information is a combination of cognitive processes they engage when originally encountering the information (i.e., encoding processes) and another processes they encounter later when trying to recall/recognize the information (i.e., search processes). To help disentangle these processes, it is often useful to test participants’ ability to recall/recognize items they have experienced, but did not deliberately try to learn. These “implicit” tests, which are widely used in memory research, involve having participants view a list of items but omitting the instruction to memorize the items, and then giving them a surprise memory test. The task you did today was such an implicit task, and thus we did not tell you your memory would be tested before starting the experiment. The implicit version of the task is identical to a control version completed by other participants with the exception that they are instructed to memorize the items before seeing them. To protect the integrity of the implicit test, we ask that you do not discuss it with anyone who may participate in this study.