Attention During Short-term Remembering: the Memory Stroop Effect and the Memory Facilitation Effect

A new method to research attention and short-term remembering interaction is presented. Attention and memory are investigated during performing of the unified task that demands both for attention and memory. The memory span is measured using the stimuli of the Stroop task (the names of the colors that are printed with color inks). There were found some new results: The Stroop memory effect is a decreasing of the memory span in condition of incongruity between the meaning of the word and the color in comparison with short-term remembering of the colors of the meaningless set of symbols. The memory facilitation effect is increasing of the memory span in conditions of congruity between the meaning of the word and the color in comparison with short-term remembering of the colors of the meaningless set of symbols. It was found that the Stroop memory effect higher in magnitude than the memory facilitation effect.