Perceptual difficulty effects on memory: The benefit of incongruency for subsequent retention

Abstract

This thesis examined the intersection between processing difficulties at encoding and subsequent retention. A number of reported effects describe the finding of better memory performance for items that were difficult to process in an earlier study phase compared to items that were easy to process—a finding broadly captured by the desirable difficulty principle (Bjork, 1994; Bjork & Bjork, 2011). The Introduction provides an overview of several of these effects, as well as an evaluation of theoretical frameworks that may help us understand the cognitive processes that may be shared across them. The empirical work focuses specifically on one memory effect—better recognition for targets formerly presented on incongruent as opposed to congruent trials in a selective attention task. The effects reviewed in the Introduction, including the one studied in the three empirical chapters, all involve difficulty in processing target information in a relatively simple perceptual identification task. The work covered in this thesis demonstrates that manipulations of perceptual features reliably benefit subsequent memory when the difficulty directs additional processing toward higher-order features. Furthermore, the memory test must appropriately tap into these conceptual feature representations at retrieval. The implications of these findings is discussed in the context of the desirable difficulty literature, as well as the attention and memory literatures more broadly.