Dissociações entre tarefas de memória: Evidência para uma distinção entre as memórias implícita e explícita (*)

 

Marco Vasconcelos (**)

Pedro B. Albuquerque (***)

 

RESUMO

As investigações sobre memória humana têm revelado dissociações entre diferentes tarefas de memória, quer em sujeitos normais, quer em pacientes com défices de memória. O presente estudo procurou avaliar a aplicabilidade das abordagens teóricas dominantes nesta área em participantes normais. A abordagem dos múltiplos sistemas de memória prevê dissociações entre um sistema de memória implícita e um sistema de memória explícita. Alternativamente, a abordagem da transferência apropriada de processamento prevê dissociações baseadas no grau de sobreposição das operações cognitivas requeridas na codificação e recuperação da informação, prevendo dissociações entre tarefas conceptuais e perceptivas. Os resultados obtidos revelaram que o desempenho nas tarefas de memória explícita de evocação livre e evocação guiada por pistas grafémicas se dissociou do desempenho nas tarefas de memória implícita de completamento de fragmentos de palavras e de conhecimento geral. A manipulação do nível de processamento de informação durante o estudo potenciou o desempenho nas tarefas explícitas, mas não teve qualquer efeito nas tarefas implícitas, independentemente do carácter conceptual ou perceptivo das mesmas. Estes resultados sugerem que as dissociações entre diferentes tarefas de memória são melhor compreendidas assumindo a existência de diferentes sistemas de memória subjacentes às diferentes tarefas.

Palavras-chave: Memória implícita, memória explícita, processamento perceptivo, processamento conceptual, dissociações.

 

ABSTRACT

Human memory research has been revealing dissociations among memory tasks, both in normal and in memory-impaired subjects. This study evaluates the applicability of the dominant theoretical approaches in this domain to normal participants. The memory systems approach predicts dissociations between an implicit memory system and an explicit memory system. Alternatively, a processing account predicts dissociations based on the degree of overlap between the cognitive operations at study and test, resulting in dissociations between conceptual and perceptive tasks. Results revealed that performance in the explicit memory tasks of free recall and graphemic cued recall was dissociated from performance in the implicit memory tasks of word fragment completion and general knowledge questions. The manipulation of the level of processing at study enhanced performance in the explicit memory tasks, but had no effect on the implicit memory ones, independently of the perceptive or conceptual nature of the tasks. These findings suggest that dissociations among memory measures are better explained in terms of different memory systems that underlie different memory tasks.

Key words: Implicit memory, explicit memory, data-driven processes, conceptually-driven processes, dissociations.

 

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(*) Dados submetidos pelo primeiro autor ao Departamento de Psicologia da Universidade do Minho em cumprimento parcial dos requisitos para a obtenção do grau de mestre em Psicologia, área de especialização em Ciências Cognitivas.

(**) Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, USA. E-mail: marcov@psych.purdue.edu

(***) Universidade do Minho, Portugal.