In defense of functional independence: Violations of assumptions underlying the process-dissociation procedure?

Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre,University of TorontoT. Curron and D. L. Hintzman (1995) claim to have shown that the independence assumptionunderlying the process-dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) is not justified. Theyargued that correlations between processes at the level of items can result in an underestima-tion of automatic processes large enough to produce artifactual dissociations between processestimates. In contrast, the authors show that the effects of extremely high correlations at thelevel of items are likely to be trivial, and not differential across conditions. Curran andHintzman's dissociations probably reflect violations of boundary conditions for use of theprocess-dissociation procedure, rather than violations of independence.It is important to distinguish between automatic andconsciously controlled memory processes. For example,although amnesic patients are often unable to consciouslyremember previously presented words on direct memorytests, such as recall or recognition tests, they use the wordson indirect memory tests, such as stem- or fragment-completion tests, more often than would be expected bychance (Moscovitch, Vriezen, that is, controlled processes often influence perfor-mance on indirect memory tests (Holender, 1986; Toth,Reingold, Parkin, Reid, & Russo,1990).Table 1 summarizes results from experiments that haveused the process-dissociation procedure to examine theeffects of attention and of presentation duration on R and A.'