How to Remember Something You Didn't Say

When individuals suppress secret information, they should keep this omission in mind to not let this information slip out in future situations. Following recent findings about automatic memory retrieval of outright lies, we hypothesized that suppression tendencies are also automatically retrieved from memory when being confronted with a question to which one has previously omitted secret information. In an online study, participants first had to withhold information about a fictitious love affair during a simulated chat with their relationship partner. To assess automatic suppression tendencies, we developed an indirect response time measure wherein a key that had previously been established to indicate suppression now had to be pressed in response to word stimuli that were presented in a specific color. We found implicit suppression tendencies for words that had been withheld during the interview if they were presented following the prime that involved the question which the secret answer referred to. The question primes or the secret information alone did not elicit a suppression tendency, indicating that suppression responses were automatically retrieved from memory after re-encountering the combination of the question and the critical answer. The results are discussed regarding the theoretical implications for automatic memory processes.

Reconsidering the Automaticity of Visual Statistical Learning

Statistical learning refers to the process of extracting regularities from the world without feedback. What are the necessary conditions for statistical learning to arise? It has been argued that visual statistical learning (VSL) is “automatic”, such that subjects will passively and even unconsciously extract statistical regularities from streams of visual input as long as they attend to the stimuli. In contrast, our data indicate that simply attending to stimuli is not, on its own, sufficient for learning. In Experiments 1 & 2, we provided incidental exposure to regularities in a stream of images and observed little to zero VSL across a range of conditions. In Experiment 3, we found that explicitly instructing participants to seek regularities dramatically improved their performance on direct measures of learning, but not on an indirect response time measure. Finally, in Experiments 4 & 5, we demonstrated that a methodological confound in prior work using the indirect response time measure could account for some previous evidence of automatic and implicit VSL.Overall, we found very little evidence of learning using direct measures of VSL, and no evidence of learning using an indirect response time measure. Participants who recognized visual sequence regularities in a forced-choice task could also often recreate the sequences when explicitly probed, indicating their knowledge was not entirely implicit. We suggest that some form of active engagement with stimuli may be needed to extract sequential regularities, and that VSL does not occur automatically.

Response-Time Measures as a Means of Exploring Tonal Hierarchies

We explore the possibility of studying music perception with responsetime measures. Subjects heard either a chord (tonic triad) or scale prime, followed by a single note, and indicated whether the note did or did not belong in the primed key. Overall, the data resemble the tonal hierarchy previously demonstrated with other methods, thus establishing the validity of the response-time measure. In addition, the scale primes superimpose a recency effect on the standard hierarchy, as would be expected from a serially presented stimulus. We discuss what this implies about tonal hierarchies, and the use of response-time measures to study the online processes of music listening. We also report data for nondiatonic tones.