Unintentional learning of word associations occurs when items co-occur in the focus of attention¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · reviewr2·q2
Currency · newest study 2014 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q2 i? Participants incidentally learned which words came from the same list better for short lists of 3 items (about 59%) than for lists of 6 or 9 items (about 53%), supporting binding in the focus of attention. → Cowan Nelson 2014
Evidence¶
Cowan Nelson 2014¶
Cowan Nelson. (2014). Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education. Educational Psychology Review. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207727/
q2 · i? · review · r2
The review reports an incidental task experiment by Cowan, Donnell, and Saults in which participants judged whether word pairs came from the same list. "Performance was better for words from short lists of 3 items (about 59%) than for words from lists of 6 or 9 items (about 53%)", a small effect supporting unintentional association formation in the focus of attention.
"performance was better for words from short lists of 3 items (about 59%) than for words from lists of 6 or 9 items (about 53%)"
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- With incidental orienting tasks that focus processing on individual words and give no incentive to form associations, distributed presentations produce better free recall than massed presentations — related
- When the orienting task prevented interitem associations, the within-list lag effect was attenuated after long retention intervals and this attenuation was not a floor effect — related
- With constant judgment standards, the same-different orienting task at repetitions did not affect the within-list lag effect, arguing against inattention and encoding-variability explanations — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
focus-of-attention-incidental-binding |
title |
Unintentional learning of word associations occurs when items co-occur in the focus of attention |
description |
Unintentional learning of word associations occurs when items co-occur in the focus of attention |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2014 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-17 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — cowan-nelson-2014 |
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