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
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
An, Wei, "Performance or Processing? Effects of Levels of Processing and Divided Attention on Memory-Related Eye Movements" (2014). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 2240.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/7048162
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/