The influence of meaningfulness upon intentional and incidental learning of verbal material

The present investigation concerned the relationship between intentional and incidental learning of verbal material. Both task meaningfulness (sequential dependency of the material) and shifts in performance over time were examined for differential patterns under both types of learning conditions. Cover task performance consisted of the search for typographical errors across four paragraphs of a narrative, learning the recall and recognition of examples of categories of objects in the text. There was lack of support for the argument that incidental and intentional learning represent two distinct types; rather Ss responded similarly to increased task meaningfulness under both learning conditions and evidenced identical performance patterns over time. Results were interpreted within an intentional-attentional hypothesis of incidental learning.