EFFECTS OF AUTOMATIC ASSOCIATIVE ACTIVATION ON EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT MEMORY TESTS

Ss made either a graphemic or a semantic decision concerning word pairs during a study phase. Pair relatedness effects were observed in behavioral measures for the semantic task only, but a physiological measure (event-related potential) showed relatedness effects for both study tasks. Relatedness at study helped subsequent memory for tests involving word generation (fragment completion and cued recall). These effects were independent of those of the level of processing on memory. The results support Graf and Mandler's (1984) two-process model of implicit and explicit remembering and demonstrate that automatically activated associations can have significant effects on both types of remembering.