The Effects of Task-Irrelevant Information on Memory: The Associative Memory Stroop Task

The goal of the present thesis was to evaluate the validity of a new Stroop-like paradigm as a tool to measure paired-associate learning. Hazan-Liran and Miller (2017) developed a task to study how task-irrelevant ink colour information affects learning efficacy (see also Miller, Hazan-Liran, & Cohen, 2018). The task asks participants to learn pairs of colour concepts and numbers (e.g. blue-5) whilst the concepts are presented in a neutral ink colour (e.g. black ink) but the numbers are coloured in either congruent ink colours (e.g. the number 5 printed in blue ink), incongruent ink colours (e.g. 5 in brown ink) or neutral ink colours (e.g. 5 in black ink). The present thesis named this task the Associative Memory Stroop Task (AMST) and aimed to replicate the findings in Hazan-Liran and colleagues' studies when task-irrelevant ink colour effects on this task are measured by memory accuracy on cued-recall tests and recognition tests. Colour names (e.g. blue), colour-related words (e.g. sky) and emotional words (e.g. unhappy) were employed. It was hypothesised that more accurate memory performance would occur with congruent ink colours than neutral ink colours (i.e. facilitation) whilst poorer memory accuracy would be reported with incongruent ones compared to neutral ink colours (i.e. interference). Chapter 2 tested colour names and colour-related words with cued-recall tests and recognition tests. Chapter 3 explored the use of colour-related concepts on the AMST with recognition tests. Chapter 4 examined the emotional factor during the AMST with cued-recall tests. Overall, the analyses revealed facilitation and interference effects on cued-recall tests and interference on recognition tests when the words were colour names. Other types of colour words failed to produce the effects. The present research suggested possible explanations for these results.