An examination of individual differences in levels of processing

ABSTRACT

The present study examined individual differences in levels of processing. Participants completed a cued recall task in which they made either rhyme or semantic judgements on pairs of items. Pupillary responses during encoding were recorded as a measure of the allocation of attentional effort and participants completed multiple measures of working and long-term memory. The results suggested levels of processing effect in both accuracy and pupillary responses with deeper levels of processing demonstrating higher accuracy and larger pupillary responses than shallower levels of processing. Most participants demonstrated levels of processing effect, but there was substantial variability in the size of the effect. Variation in levels of processing was positively related to individual differences in long-term memory and the magnitude of the pupillary levels of processing effect, but not working memory. These results suggest that some of the variation in levels of processing is likely due to individual differences in the allocation of attentional effort (particularly to items processed deeply) during encoding.

KEYWORDS:

• Levels of processing
• individual differences
• pupillometry
• memory‌

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 3. Change in pupil diameter during the encoding period for deep and shallow conditions for (a) low levels of processing individuals and (b) high levels of processing individuals. Shaded areas reflect one standard error of the mean.

Notes

1 As seen, in Figure 3, it appears that the high LOP individuals’ peak pupillary response occurred later in the encoding period than low LOP individuals. Therefore, we explored whether individual differences in the latency to peak were associated with the behavioral LOP effect. Peak latency was longer for the Deep condition (M = 2574.7, SD = 539.2) compared to the Shallow condition (M = 2462.8, SD = 517.9), t(153) = 3.01, p = 0.003, Cohen's d = 0.24. However, the LOP behavioral effect was not correlated with the LOP peak latency effect, r = -0.07, p = 0.41. Thus, individual differences in the behavioral LOP effect were not necessarily related to LOP latency effect when examining all participants.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Office of Naval Research grant N00014-22-1-2083.