PRIMING AND THEORIES OF MEMORY - A REPLY

Ratcliff and McKoon ( 1 994) attempt to buttress the case for non-spreading-activation models of associative priming by showing that first-response free association probabilities do not predict priming effects, and sequential effects in lexical decisions are predicted by at least one non-spreading-activation model. The author argues that their attempt to predict priming from free association is not informative because they did not propose a model of how association in memory is manifested in free association, these predictions depended on assumptions that are not consistent with the model tested, the compound-cue model is a poor model of sequential effects, and non-spreading-activation models still cannot explain the absence of inhibition following nonword primes when responses to the primes are not required.