Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A connectionist model incorporating activation and elaboration learning was investigated in five simulations of dissociation effects between implicit and explicit memory tasks. The first rwo simulations concerned the word frequency effect, revealing a high-frequency advantage in free recall and a low-frequency advantage in word completion. The third and fourth simulations were of the interference effect, which appeared to depend upon the amount of overlap between experimental material and intervening material. The last simulation addressed the focused vs. divided attention dissociation effect. Free recall performance was primarily affected by divided attention, but under conditions of high load word completion performance was also reduced. It is argued that a full model will probably not only implement activation/elaboration learning, but will also incorporate elements of the two other accounts available.