Unique Mechanisms for the Availability of Declarative Memory Elements and the Strengthening of Cognitive Operations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of memory for prior cognitive operations and availability of declarative memory elements in long-term semantic priming. The impetus for this investigation was the role of working memory (WM) in complex cognitive processing. Empirical estimates of WM are too limited to explain complex cognitive processes. Therefore, contemporary models of WM propose access to long-term memory (LTM) to expand these limits. The priming literature provides one theoretical mechanism for access to LTM: long-term semantic priming. However, explanations for long-term semantic priming include both increased availability of LTM elements and the facilitation of prior cognitive operations. Our goal was to examine if the facilitation of prior cognitive operations is dependent on the availability of previously encountered LTM elements. A task used in previous research proposed to capture the facilitation of cognitive operations coupled with a directed forgetting manipulation was used to examine this relationship. Three experiments were conducted to that end. All experiments resulted in facilitation of the procedure of categorization. Experiments 1 and 2 additionally found relatively poor recognition for items that participants were told to forget despite the fact that categorization was facilitated for related items. Experiment 3 resulted in similarly poor recognition for category names that participants were told to forget. Taken together, the experiments in this investigation demonstrate a clear separation between the cognitive operations and declarative elements of the categorization task. Namely, the continued availability of declarative elements is not necessary for the subsequent facilitation of categorization operations.