Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA.
Learn Mem. 2010 Sep 1;17(9):454-9. doi: 10.1101/lm.1815010. Print 2010 Sep.
Two recent studies described conditions under which recognition memory performance appeared to be driven by nondeclarative memory. Specifically, participants successfully discriminated old images from highly similar new images even when no conscious memory for the images could be retrieved. Paradoxically, recognition performance was better when images were studied with divided attention than when images were studied with full attention. Furthermore, recognition performance was better when decisions were rated as guesses than when decisions were associated with low or high confidence. In three experiments, we adopted the paradigm used in the earlier studies in an attempt to repeat this intriguing work. Our attempts were unsuccessful. In all experiments, recognition was better when images were studied with full attention than when images were studied with divided attention. Recognition was also better when participants indicated high or low confidence in their decision than when they indicated that their decision was a guess. Thus, our results conformed to what typically has been reported in studies of recognition memory, and we were unable to demonstrate recognition without awareness. We encourage others to explore this paradigm, and to try to identify conditions under which the phenomenon might be demonstrated.
两项近期研究描述了这样的条件，在这些条件下，识别记忆的表现似乎是由非陈述性记忆驱动的。具体来说，即使参与者无法回忆起对这些图像的有意识记忆，他们也能成功地区分旧图像和高度相似的新图像。矛盾的是，当以分散注意力的方式研究图像时，识别表现优于以全神贯注的方式研究图像。此外，当决策被评定为猜测时，识别表现优于当决策与低或高置信度相关联时的表现。在三项实验中，我们采用了早期研究中使用的范式，试图重复这项有趣的工作。但我们的尝试并未成功。在所有实验中，当以全神贯注的方式研究图像时，识别效果要好于以分散注意力的方式研究图像。当参与者对自己的决策表示高度或低度自信时，识别效果也更好，而不是表示他们的决策是猜测。因此，我们的结果符合在识别记忆研究中通常报告的结果，并且我们无法证明没有意识的识别。我们鼓励其他人探索这种范式，并尝试确定可能表现出这种现象的条件。
