THEORIES OF PRIMING .1. ASSOCIATIVE DISTANCE AND LAG

Automatic associative priming occurs in a large number of memory retrieval tasks. including semantic categorization. lexical decisions, item recognition, naming, and judgments of spatial location. Priming has been commonly attributed to one or the other of 2 alternative mechanisms: spreading activation or construction of compound retrieval cues- This article reports the results of 3 experiments that were designed to test spreading-activation and non-spreading-activation models of priming. The findings were consistent with the spreading-activation models. but inconsistent with the non-spreading-activation models. These results suggest that a rejection of spreading-activation mechanisms is premature.