Stimulus exposure time and perceptual memory

Abstract

The recent explosion of research on implicit memory has facilitated the examination of perceptual and conceptual processes in the encoding of information. Nevertheless, stimulus exposure time--the amount of time that a stimulus is physically available to a perceiver's scrutiny--has received little attention. In the present paper, we examine the effect of stimulus exposure time on three implicit memory measures (word-fragment completion, perceptual identification, and general knowledge) and two explicit memory measures (graphemic cued recall and semantic cued recall). In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that increases in exposure time lead to increases in implicit perceptual memory, but not to implicit conceptual memory, when the encoding task focuses on perceptual features of the stimulus. We replicated this effect in Experiment 2 and demonstrated that increases in exposure time lead to increases in perceptual and conceptual memory when the measures are explicit. Thus, the current experiments demonstrate that manipulations of exposure time lead to dissociations in implicit, but not explicit, memory.