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The present work had as objective to test the effects of different general instructions on rule following. Eighteen college students were exposed to a modified match-to-sample task and divided in three groups, which differed in the presentation of preliminary instructions (complete, without passages about materials or without passages about consequences). Subjects of each group were divided in two experimental conditions, in which accurate and inaccurate instructions were presented. Results showed that absence of sections about materials in the instructions complicates the learning task while absence of sections about consequences decreases the variety of responses. Notwithstanding, all subjects that performed the task correctly followed both accurate and inaccurate instructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to verify whether the activation of critical items in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm of producing false memories could also occur in the word stem completion task. The finding that the level of processing did not seem to have any effect on the word stem completion task supported the conclusion that the stem completion task was in fact an implicit memory test. The impact of a previous recall in a following memory task was also evaluated. The results indicated that the previous recall inhibited the effect of the processing level in the recognition task. In the word stem completion task the increase of stems completed with associates was only relevant when words were encoded superficially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]