Award Date

12-1-2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

Colleen Parks

Second Committee Member

Mark Ashcraft

Third Committee Member

David Copeland

Fourth Committee Member

Alice Corkill

Number of Pages

117

Abstract

Human memories are expressed either with or without consciousness, termed as explicit and implicit memories, respectively. Different encoding manipulations like levels of processing and divided attention have been shown to affect explicit memories but not implicit memories. These dissociations, however, were only found between explicit and implicit item memories. Whether explicit and implicit relational memories will exhibit similar dissociations is still unknown. In order to determine whether explicit and implicit relational memories dissociated in a similar way as explicit and implicit item memories, the levels of processing and divided attention were manipulated in the present study and participants' relational memories were tested either directly or indirectly while their eye movements were recorded simultaneously as an index of implicit relational memory suggested by previous studies. It was predicted that dissociations would be observed between explicit and implicit relational memories only if implicit relational memory behaved like implicit item memory. However, several pilot studies showed that there was no memory effect in the implicit relational memory. Therefore, the eye tracking experiments were modified and the effects of levels of processing and divided attention manipulations on human eye movements in direct relational memory tests were examined. Participants' eye movements were affected by the levels of processing manipulation, although there was no main effect of the divided attention manipulation. Therefore, the different eye movements may be associated with the levels of processing specifically rather than levels of performance in general.

Keywords

Distraction (Psychology); Human information processing; Memory; Recollection (Psychology)

Disciplines

Cognitive Psychology | Psychology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/


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