In defense of functional independence: Violations of assumptions underlying the process-dissociation procedure?

T. Curran and D. L. Hintzman (1995) claim to have shown that the independence assumption underlying the process-dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) is not justified. They argued that correlations between processes at the level of items can result in an underestimation of automatic processes large enough to produce artifactual dissociations between process estimates. In contrast, the authors show that the effects of extremely high correlations at the level of items are likely to be trivial, and not differential across conditions. Curran and Hintzman's dissociations probably reflect violations of boundary conditions for use of the process-dissociation procedure, rather than violations of independence.