PRIMING AND CONSTRAINTS IT PLACES ON THEORIES OF MEMORY AND RETRIEVAL

Associative priming occurs in a large number of memory retrieval tasks, including lexical decisions, naming, item recognition, and judgments of spatial location. Priming has been commonly attributed to the spread of activation or to the construction of compound retrieval cues. This article examines the relative abilities of spreading-activation and non-spreading-activation theories of priming to account for experimental results on multiple-step priming, the effects of different types of primes (e.g., nonwords vs. words), priming that spans an intervening item, priming in the naming task, and priming of associative judgments. Two conclusions are justified: First, non-spreading-activation theories will have to be specified in greater detail before definitive tests of them can be made, and second, a rejection of spreading-activation mechanisms is premature.