Lack of memory for nonattended items in dichotic listening.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate whether semantic information presented to the unattended ear in a dichotic listening experiment has a memory effect after 30 sec. In all three experiments the Brown-Peterson paradigm was employed. Experiment 1 used the release from proactive inhibition technique and found no evidence that semantic material presented to the unattended ear produced proactive inhibitory effects on attended ear material. Experiment 2 suggests that this result was not due to a memory deficiency resulting from a lack of intent to learn. Experiment 3 indicates that repetition of the same information for three trials to the unattended ear did not enhance memory performance when the material was later presented to the attended ear. Assuming that some semantic processing does occur at the time of input, an interpretation based upon the levels-of-processing approach was suggested as a possibility for explaining the negative results.