Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2009 Sep;18(3):665-78.
doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2009.04.003. Epub 2009 May 12.

Implicit working memory

Ran R Hassin  1 , John A Bargh, Andrew D Engell, Kathleen C McCulloch
Affiliations

Implicit working memory

Ran R Hassin et al. Conscious Cogn. 2009 Sep.

Abstract

Working Memory (WM) plays a crucial role in many high-level cognitive processes (e.g., reasoning, decision making, goal pursuit and cognitive control). The prevalent view holds that active components of WM are predominantly intentional and conscious. This conception is oftentimes expressed explicitly, but it is best reflected in the nature of major WM tasks: All of them are blatantly explicit. We developed two new WM paradigms that allow for an examination of the role of conscious awareness in WM. Results from five studies show that WM can operate unintentionally and outside of conscious awareness, thus suggesting that the current view should be expanded to include implicit WM.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
An illustration of a pattern set (a) its yoked broken pattern set (b) and control set (c). The numbers appearing below the locations indicate order of appearance, and did not appear in the actual study. The disks in the actual study appeared sequentially, such that participants saw only one at a time.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

  • Consciousness is still in business.
    Guterman Y. Guterman Y. Conscious Cogn. 2010 Jun;19(2):653-5. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.005. Epub 2010 Apr 8. Conscious Cogn. 2010. PMID: 20381379

References

    1. Baars BJ. Some essential differences between consciousness and attention, perception, and working memory. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal. 1997;6(2–3):363–371. - PubMed
    1. Baars BJ, Franklin S. How conscious experience and working memory interact. Trends in Cognitive Science. 2003;7(4):166–172. - PubMed
    1. Baddeley AD. Consciousness and working memory. Consciousness and Cognition. 1992;1:3–6.
    1. Baddeley AD. Working memory and conscious awareness. In: Collins A, Gathercole S, editors. Theories of memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 1993. pp. 11–28.
    1. Baddeley AD. The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2000;4(11):417–423. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources