Abstracts Category : Other

The influence of divided attention on directed forgetting

by Trisha N Patel

In list-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm, participants study two lists of items, with half of them being told to forget List 1 before studying List 2. The typical findings involve impaired List 1 memory in the forget group compared to the remember group (known as DF costs), and enhanced List 2 memory in the forget group compared to the remember group (known as the DF benefits). Previous research suggests that dividing attention during List 2 learning eliminates DF thereby serving as a boundary condition for obtaining DF (e.g., Conway et al., 2000). This study re-examined this claim, and included additional conditions not previously employed in prior research. In this study, attention was divided by holding a concurrent load of six-digits during encoding of List 1 or List 2, during both lists, or none of the lists. Contrary to the previous reports, DF was unaffected when attention was divided during List 2. This was observed across two experiments, where the lists were tested separately (Experiment 1) or simultaneously (Experiment 2). In contrast, the novel finding was that dividing attention during List 1 reduced DF costs compared to the undivided conditions (Experiment 1). DF benefits were overall unaffected by divided attention manipulation. The results were interpreted by proposing that divided attention impacted the strength of item-to-context associations formed encoding.Advisors/Committee Members: Sahakyan, Lili (advisor).