9616323 MUSEN When people tell friends about what they have learned, they refer to facts and tasks that they are "aware" of learning. However, there is evidence that one acquires information in the absence of awareness. This research will help determine the conditions under which people can acquire multiple pieces of information independently of awareness, as well as how much attention needs to be allocated to each task in order for the information to be transferred to a more permanent memory store. By understanding under which situations people best acquire such information, it should be possible to determine how to present information to maximize human learning. An example of learning without awareness comes from research with amnesic patients. Although amnesic patients cannot remember an earlier presentation of a word, they use a word more often to complete a sentence when it was in fact presented recently than when it had not been presented recently. This and related findings provide evidence for priming, a form of implicit memory. Implicit memory is often contrasted with explicit memory. Explicit tests of memory include recall and recognition, and tap memory for facts and events that are available as conscious recollections. An important contrast between implicit and explicit memory is that they appear to be affected differently by the allocation of attention. If attention is divided between two or more tasks, explicit memory suffers. For example, if one watches the news on television while talking on the phone, one will remember fewer of today's news events than if one watched the news without attempting to carry out another task simultaneously. In contrast, implicit memory has traditionally been thought to be less dependent on attention. One can carry out a familiar motor task while at the same time carrying out a competing task that requires a different set of mental activities. For example, a skilled typist can type while reading a familiar passage. Recently, it has been demonstrated that focussed attention is needed for some tasks that tap implicit memory. Specifically, focussed attention is not necessary for learning single pieces of information but is required for learning multiple items simultaneously, such as that "red" and "triangle" go together. In this situation, the person must attend fully to both of these attributes and attempt to bind them in memory as a single object, like a "red triangle." In such cases, cognitive resources cannot always be shared with another task. Under these and similar circumstances in which separate items must be integrated and stored in memory, cognitive resources from limited-capacity short-term memory are required. If cognitive resources are overtaxed, learning will not occur. The properties of the information to be learned, such as its familiarity, affect the ability to learn more than one thing at a time. This research will help determine the conditions under which multiple tasks can be learned implicitly without hurting performance. ***
