Automatic memory search and the effects of information load and irrelevant information.

If automaticity is identified with both light capacity usage and little attentional selectivity, then an automatic process should be symptomatized by both small effects of concurrent information load and large susceptibility to interference by similar but irrelevant information. Several experiments are reported that test this prediction for memory search among sets of words. For well-learned memory sets, a small effect of information load co-occurs with a large effect of irrelevant information. By contrast, for arbitrary sets, a large effect of information load co-occurs with a small effect of irrelevant information. These results do confirm the correlation between effects of information load and irrelevant information as a hallmark for identifying automatic processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)