Priming, Procedural Memory, and Conditioning (Implicit) • 163Figure 6.11a was presented fi rst, and then participants were shown more
and more complete versions (b, c, d, and e) until they were able to identify
the picture.
The results, shown in ● Figure 6.12, indicate that by the third
day of testing these participants made fewer errors before identify-
ing the pictures than they did at the beginning of training, even
though they had no memory for any of the previous day’s training.
The improvement of performance represents an effect of implicit
memory because the patients learned from experience even though
they couldn’t remember having had the experience.
Implicit memory is not simply a laboratory phenomenon, but also
occurs in everyday experience. An example of a situation in which
implicit memory may affect our behavior without our awareness is
when we are exposed to advertisements that extol the virtues of a
product or perhaps just present the product’s name. Although we may
believe that we are unaffected by some advertisements, they can have
an effect just because we are exposed to them.
This idea is supported by the results of an experiment by T. J.
Perfect and C. Askew (1994), who had participants scan articles in
a magazine. Each page of print was faced by an advertisement, but
participants were not told to pay attention to the advertisements.
When they were later asked to rate a number of advertisements on
various dimensions, such as how appealing, eye-catching, distinctive,
and memorable they were, they gave higher ratings to the ones they had been exposed
to than to other advertisements that they had never seen. This result qualifi es as an
effect of implicit memory because when the participants were asked to indicate which
advertisements had been presented at the beginning of the experiment, they recognized
only an average of 2.8 of the original 25 advertisements.
This result is related to the propaganda effect, in which participants are more likely
to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, simply because they
have been exposed to them before. This effect can occur even when the person is told
that the statements are false when they fi rst read or hear them (Begg et al., 1992). The
propaganda effect involves implicit memory because it can operate even when people
are not aware that they have heard or seen a statement before, and may even have
thought it was false when they fi rst heard it.● (^) FIGURE 6.11 Incomplete pictures developed by Gollin (1960) that were used by
Warrington and Weiskrantz (1968) to study implicit memory in patients with amnesia.
(Source: E. K. Warrington & L. Weiskrantz, “New Method of Testing Long-Term Retention With Special Reference
to Amnesic Patients,” Nature, London, 217, March 9, 1968, 972–974, Figure 1. Copyright © 1968 Nature Publishing
Group. Republished with permission.)
(a) (c)
(b) (d) (e)
● (^) FIGURE 6.12 Results of Warrington and
Weiskrantz’s (1968) experiment. (Source: Based on E. K.
Warrington & L. Weiskrantz, “New Method of Testing Long-Term Retention
With Special Reference to Amnesic Patients,” Nature, 217, 972–974,
March 9, 1968.)
30
20
10
0
Error score
123
Day of training
Performance improves
even though the person
doesn’t remember
training
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