A DISSOCIATION BETWEEN 2 IMPLICIT CONCEPTUAL TESTS SUPPORTS THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN TYPES OF CONCEPTUAL PROCESSING

Subjects studied words in a classification task (to what categories does it belong?) or in a production task (producing associates to the word) and then completed one of two implicit memory tests-category association or free association. The classification study task and the category-association test emphasize categorical relations between concepts, and the production study task and the free-association test draw on associative relations. As predicted by the transfer-appropriate processing principle, priming in the category-association test was larger for words studied under the classification task than for those studied under the production task, whereas the opposite was true in the free-association test. This crossover dissociation is the first obtained between two implicit conceptual tests, and it provides support for the claim that it is necessary to distinguish between different types of conceptual processing.