ABSTRACT
The notion of control or of control processes has a long standing tradition in human memory research. For example, once upon a time memory was thought to consist of at least two stores, namely, a short-term store and a long-term store (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). The transfer of information from the short-term store to the long-term store was seen to be at least partly under the control of the subject. For example, rehearsal has been interpreted as a control process by which information residing in the short-term store may be copied into the long-term store. For sure, this view has proven to be too simple, and the control process of rehearsal was found to differ according to the goals subjects may pursue (Craik & Watkins, 1973). Similarly, memory research has favored the idea that subjects may control which information they are willing to forget at the time of encoding. Research on the phenomenon of intentional or directed forgetting has revealed that forgetting can be affected by voluntary mechanisms that may be utilized by the person with varying effectiveness (Epstein, 1972). On the other hand, the levels of processing approach has shown that later demonstrations of memory do not require an intention to learn or to store information at the time of encoding (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). Even more importantly, some information seems to be stored automatically at the time of encoding. By the standard definition, automaticity provides a basis for rapid responding, does not require attentional capacity, and does not require intent (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1979; Posner & Snyder, 1975).
