Unconscious Influences of Memory: Dissociations and Automaticity

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the research on unconscious influences of memory. The term unconscious generally brings the psychoanalytic tradition to mind, though the unconscious is a cognitive trait rather than psychoanalytic. Memory for past experience automatically influences the ease of processing and the interpretation of later events. Subjective experience is constructed and reflects an unconscious attribution or inference process that attributes effects to a source. Because of errors in the attribution process, measures of subjective experience are valuable as indirect tests of memory. To be certain that effects are produced by unconscious influences of memory, it is necessary to arrange a situation such that automatic and consciously controlled influences are placed in opposition. A process dissociation procedure can be used to separately estimate effects of variables on consciously controlled and automatic processes; this helps in estimating consciously controlled processing as the difference between performance under conditions in which consciously controlled and automatic processes produce effects in the same direction as compared with performance under conditions in which the two processes act in opposition. Performance on both indirect and direct tests of memory relies on memory for prior episodes. Memory revealed by indirect tests is neither a characteristic of processing controlled by the present physical stimuli nor it is a characteristic of a memory representation of present physical stimuli.