Stimulus with a past: Memory task performance affected by frequency and probability of intentional acts involving the stimulus

Abstract

The present work hypothesized that memory instances for a stimulus should be specific to the intention at the time of stimulus acquisition, and that the representation of a stimulus should include the intentional history of the stimulus (an assembly of intention-specific instances of the stimulus) rather than frequency of the stimulus independent of intentional acts involving the stimulus. The present work summarized the intentional history of a word by the frequency and probability of past intentional acts involving the word. The intention-specific frequency and intention-specific probability of a word in relation to a semantic judgment task were operationalized by the co-occurrences of the word and a semantic scale (e.g. beautiful/ugly) on the Internet (www.google.com), assuming that the number of times the word and the semantic scale co-occur is proportional to the number of times people intentionally processed the meaning of the word with respect to the semantic scale. Six experiments compared the effects of intention-specific frequency and probability to the effects of word frequency in an implicit memory task (repetition priming) and explicit memory tasks (recognition and free recall). Consistent with the hypothesis, performance on all memory tasks was affected by the frequency or probability of the intentional act involving the word, and not by word frequency.