托福口语话题范例：Advertisement

　　Reading Part:

Explicit Memories and Implicit Memories

In everyday life, when people speak of memory, they are almost always speaking about what psychologists would call explicit memories. An explicit memory is a conscious or intentional recollection, usually of facts, names, events, or other things that a person can state or declare. There is another kind of memory that is not conscious. Memories of this kind are called implicit memories. An individual can have an experience that he or she cannot consciously recall yet still display reactions that indicate the experience has been somehow recorded in his or her brain.

　　Listening Part:

Now listen to part of a lecture on this topic in a psychology class.

(male professor) OK, um, the first kind of memory, we’re all very familiar with this, right? You probably remember what you had for dinner last night. You have a conscious memory of last night’s dinner so, um, if I ask you what did you eat last night, you could tell me.

But these other kinds of memories, implicit memories, they work differently. Let’s take an example from the world of advertising. When you are driving along a highway, you see plenty of billboards, you know, road side advertisements. You certainly don’t remember them all, but they still affect you. Marketing researchers have shown, well to be specific, let’s say there’s a billboard on the highway advertising, uh, a car called the Panther. The ad shows a big picture of the car and above the car, in huge letters, is the name of the car, Panther. A lot of people drive by the billboard, but ask those drivers later if they saw any advertisements for cars, and well, they’ll think about it and a lot of them will say no. They honestly don’t remember seeing any. They have no conscious memory of the Panther billboard.

So, you ask these same people a different question. You ask, um, OK, you ask them to name an animal starting with a letter P. What do you think they’ll answer? Do they say Pig? Pig is the most common animal that starts with the letter P. But they don’t say Pig. They say Panther! The billboard had an effect, even though the drivers don’t remember ever seeing it.

　　Question:

Using the example of the car advertisement, explain what is meant by implicit memory.

　　Sample Answer：

In the lecture, the professor mainly talks about implicit memory which is that sometimes we can remember things without even realizing it. For example, when people see a car ad on the billboard, they can unconsciously remember details in the ad. Say the car in the ad is called panther, people can’t remember that they've seen a car ad on the highway, or anything has to do with panther. But interestingly, when they are asked to name an animal whose name starts with a “p”, they’ll say “panther” instead of “pig” which is more commonly known. The billboard had an effect even though the drivers aren't aware of it.