THE EFFECTS OF COLOR IN IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT TESTS OF MEMORY

We report two experiments that explore why recent investigations of implicit memory did not find any effects of color information on test performance. The argument that previous failures to find effects of repetition priming were due to an arbitrary association between objects and colors was found to be wanting. To the contrary, both experiments showed no or small effects of repetition for objects paired with their prototypical colors. A second argument according to which subjects attend to the colors at encoding did not fare much better. More importantly, however, we found strong effects of repetition priming with a conceptual implicit memory measure, whereas previous research had relied exclusively on perceptual tests of implicit memory. In both experiments, the subjects were asked to choose a suitable color for each object at testing. No instructions about remembering the objects were given. The results demonstrated strong preferences for the previously seen colors in the color-choice task. Furthermore, this effect was present to the same extent with picture objects and with object names, corroborating the conceptual nature of the implicit memory measure. Finally, we observed many functional dissociations with explicit measures of memory for color information, demonstrating implicit use of memory in the conceptual choice- test for colors.