The results of this study support the assumption that long-term memory is not modified when a person performs a task utilizing an automatic process. Twelve university students performed an incidental learning task which consisted of scanning lists of words for either their own name, first names other than their own, words representing a unit of time, or words containing the letter G. The scanning tasks were followed by a final free recall test. Recall performance ranged from 0 to 7%. In the own-name search, none of the distractors was recalled. Other name distractors were best recalled, and distractor recall corresponding to searches for units of time and words containing G were equal. Conclusions point out that task-appropriate controlled processing determines coding efficiency, and control processing is specialized to modify long term store (LTS), whereas automatic processing performs operations without modification of LTS. (Author/GK)