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Incidental Memory
Incidental memory is defined as the ability to acquire and recall information that was unintentionally encoded and stored. It describes memory formation occurring incidentally as a byproduct of engaging in other activities without conscious and deliberate efforts to remember and meaningfully process the information. Incidental memory fosters incidental learning of inadvertently learning information, skills, and experiences during other tasks. This is considered to be more prominent in everyday situations since individuals more commonly remember incidents and information without the intention to do so through observation, repetition and social interaction.

Examples of incidental memory include remembering exactly how you met a friend, or a scene in your favourite movie.

Incidental Memory Tests
Long-term memory is a critical feature of human cognition and experimental psychology, where humans are said to have an incredible capacity for information, especially the Visual Long-term (VLTM) and episodic memory. Research show memories are build from chance encounters in the world, where individuals have the ability to store countless images, even if viewed for a short period of time.

Due to its functional significance, neuropsychological research employ tests to study memory's cognitive processes, focusing on its encoding, storage, and retrieval.

These subsequent memory test paradigms foster initial encoding of information which occurs either intentionally or incidentally.

Intentional Encoding Paradigm
Intentional encoding occurs when individuals consciously try to memorise information for memory formation, being an effortful way of acquiring episodic or semantic information by engaging attentional and executive resources.

These paradigms rely on conditions where participants are explicitly instructed to memorise material to be tested later through a memory test, or retrieval phase. Such conditions are significant to understand memory in academic and educational contexts requiring explicit studying.

Incidental Encoding Paradigm
Incidental encoding is when memory formation is unintentional.

To study this side of long-term memory, experimental psychologists use an incidental encoding paradigm. This taps into incidental learning by investigating the production of strong long-term memories depending on the engagement and attention received.

In these conditions, participants are not instructed to memorise the main stimulus for cognitive testing and are not aware of a subsequent retrieval phase. Participants' attention are directed to perform a secondary cover task as they unintentionally encode the main stimuli "along the way", then asked to recall.

This is frequently used as people often form new long-term memories through experiences getting encoded automatically.

Levels of Processing Model
Incidental encoding paradigms are used to examine the Levels-of-processing effect on incidental memory.

The Level of Processing Framework by Craik and Lockhart (1972) is a significant theory for incidental learning that postulates how levels of encoding and processing affects the extent of later retrieval. It claims that deep encoding processes increase incidental memory and later retrieval, further facilitated by emotional content.

Hence, one way to increase incidental memory and retrieval is through involving deeper levels of processing, where retention is positively related to the depth events are processed.

Attention on Incidental Memory
Psychologists argue that memory is a product of attention, where higher conscious attention results in higher incidentally acquired memory. There is significantly less information on the relationship between attention on incidental memory. However, studies show that attentional and executive functioning is more strongly associated with incidental than intentional memory.

Selective Attention
Selective attention is when individuals direct their awareness towards particular stimuli while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant or distracting stimuli.

It is proposed that incidental memory is a measure of selective attention with trade-offs between them.

Development of higher selective attention on central tasks reduces incidental memory performance with age by inhibiting information processing of irrelevant, distracting or incidental non-target stimuli. The lower the incidental score, the higher the central task score representing better selective attention.

Incidental memory is lower at older ages due to higher development in performance and information processing, enabling them to focus their attention on central tasks demanded (Hagen & Hale 1972; Maccoby & Hagen 1965; Siegel & Stevenson 1966).

Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional Amnesia
Higher repeated exposure and passive encoding of stimuli does not always lead to effective incidental memory accuracy since individuals can unintentionally remember irrelevant information with a single exposure

This is due to the mechanisms of inattentional blindness and inattentional amnesia that cause a lack of semantic processing, compromising incidental memory. These phenomenas are a byproduct of selective attention, where individuals fail to notice or recall frequently or salient encountered information deemed irrelevant when their attention is occupied, lowering incidental memory.

Through incidental encoding paradigms studying the role of attention allocation in object-location memory, these mechanisms are found to compromise incidental memory.

Individuals were not able to remember the location of fire extinguishers despite numerous exposures by being beside their office door. Inattentional blindness and amnesia may have resulted from rare encounters with fire extinguishers, preserving cognitive resources by not storing unnecessary data.

However, despite participants' extended exposure to their office building, individuals showed poor recall of the elevator panel layout, indicating that frequent physical interaction with information does not ensure accurate incidental spatial memory. Similar findings exist in other domains, where people have relatively poor recall for frequently encountered information, including stop signs (Martin & Jones, 1998) and memorable logos (e.g., Apple, Google)

Hence, these mechanisms influence incidental memory, suggesting that repeated exposures and interaction with stimuli does not perpetuate more effective incidental memory. We can improve incidental memory through goal-based selective attention and retrieval practice.

Age and Incidental Memory
Contradictory results remain on the relationship between incidental versus intentional memory and age.

Numerous studies have revealed there stands a greater impact of age on incidental as compared to intentional memory (academic.oup).

Studies show that incidental memory tends to decline with aging, where younger participants recall significantly more incidentally encoded information that the older ones (reiner & Tree, 2008) after watching a film and a day later (Patton and Meit, 1993). An explanation could be that of selective attention and incidental memory,

Another (Plancher, Gyselinck, Nicolas, and Piolino (2010)) observed that he authors observed that compared to the younger participants the older performed worse in intentional memory tasks whereas incidental memory seemed to be better preserved. This was when examining incidental memory versus intentional memory in a “virtual reality” experiment

Ryan and colleagues (2008) assessed incidental memory using a Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) and found that age had a significant negative effect on performance, aligning with results of Shuttleworth-Jordan and Bode (1995) and Joy and colleagues (2000) studies who demonstrated a significant effect of age on incidental memory.

With respect to incidental memory, a significant main effect of age was observed on all tasks and was independent of gender. In particular, the older participants performed worse both in incidental recall and recognition memory tasks when compared to younger participants

Processing Deficit hypothesis

The facilitating effect of deep and shallow encoding on older ages is under debate.

The processing deficit hypothesis states that cognitive processing resources and facilitation of deeper encoding in older ages are limited, causing lower incidental memory performance (Eysenck, 1974). This links to The Levels of Processing Framework that strained on the importance of deep and shallow encoding on incidental memory, causing memory performance is worse than in younger adults.

However, On the contrary, the production deficiency hypothesis states that older adults are less likely to self-initiate deep encoding (Mitchell and Perlmutter, 1986) but if they are told to use it, they perform comparable to younger adults in incidental memory tests (Light, 1991).

https://academic.oup.com/acn/article/32/5/519/3102932

Mitchell (1989) examined the effect of incidental learning on subsequent free recall and recognition. Participants had to name pictures, which appeared on a projection screen and, after a short delay, recalled the names of the pictures in writing and performed an old/new recognition task. Younger participants freely recalled more pictures and had a lower false alarm rate during recognition compared to older participants, but both groups performed comparable for hit rates.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2019.00173/full

brain:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9175130/

Regional brain activity associated with intentional and incidental memory retrieval was studied with PET. Previously studied and new words were presented in either an intentional or an incidental memory task. Type of task was crossed with an encoding manipulation ('deep' vs 'shallow') which varied the probability that studied items would be remembered. In both tasks, deeply encoded items were associated with greater activation in the left hippocampus than were items that had received shallow encoding, suggesting that the involvement of the hippocampus in memory retrieval is independent of whether remembering is intentional or incidental. Right prefrontal and bilateral parietal cortex were more activated during the international task than during the incidental task, irrespective of encoding condition. Thus, these regions play a more extensive role in memory retrieval when remembering is intentional.