There is an increasing line of evidence supporting the idea that the formation of lasting memories involves neural activity preceding stimulus presentation. Following this line, we presented words in an incidental learning setting and manipulated the prestimulus state by asking the participants to perform either an emotional (neutral or emotional)…

The effect of the sensory discriminability of targets from nontargets on depth of nontarget processing was examined. Depth of nontarget processing was measured by semantic overlap between targets and nontargets, reaction time, and nontarget recall. Depth of processing decreased as sensory discriminability increased, supporting multiple-loci…