The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of memory for prior cognitive operations and availability of declarative memory elements in long-term semantic priming. The impetus for this investigation was the role of working memory (WM) in complex cognitive processing. Empirical estimates of WM are too limited to explain complex cognitive processes. Therefore, contemporary models of WM propose access to long-term memory (LTM) to expand these limits. The priming literature provides one theoretical mechanism for access to LTM: long-term semantic priming. However, explanations for long-term semantic priming include both increased availability of LTM elements and the facilitation of prior cognitive operations. Our goal was to examine if the facilitation of prior cognitive operations is dependent on the availability of previously encountered LTM elements. A task used in previous research proposed to capture the facilitation of cognitive operations coupled with a directed forgetting manipulation was used to examine this relationship. Three experiments were conducted to that end. All experiments resulted in facilitation of the procedure of categorization. Experiments 1 and 2 additionally found relatively poor recognition for items that participants were told to forget despite the fact that categorization was facilitated for related items. Experiment 3 resulted in similarly poor recognition for category names that participants were told to forget. Taken together, the experiments in this investigation demonstrate a clear separation between the cognitive operations and declarative elements of the categorization task. Namely, the continued availability of declarative elements is not necessary for the subsequent facilitation of categorization operations.

中文翻译：

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陈述性记忆元素的可用性和认知操作的强化的独特机制

本研究的目的是调查记忆对于先前认知操作的作用以及声明性记忆元素在长期语义启动中的可用性。这项研究的动力是工作记忆（WM）在复杂认知处理中的作用。WM 的经验估计过于有限，无法解释复杂的认知过程。因此，当代 WM 模型建议使用长期记忆 (LTM) 来扩展这些限制。启动文献提供了一种获得 LTM 的理论机制：长期语义启动。然而，对长期语义启动的解释包括 LTM 元素可用性的增加和先前认知操作的促进。我们的目标是检查先前认知操作的促进是否依赖于先前遇到的 LTM 元素的可用性。先前研究中使用的一项任务被用来检验这种关系，该任务旨在捕捉认知操作的促进与定向遗忘操作的结合。为此进行了三个实验。所有实验都促进了分类过程。实验 1 和 2 还发现，尽管事实上相关项目的分类是方便的，但参与者被告知要忘记的项目的识别能力相对较差。实验 3 也导致参与者被告知要忘记的类别名称的识别效果也很差。总的来说，本次调查中的实验证明了分类任务的认知操作和陈述性元素之间存在明显的分离。即，声明性元素的持续可用性对于随后的分类操作的促进来说不是必需的。