The proposed research is concerned with the effects of priming on memory retrieval. The present proposal attacks this general problem on three different fronts. The first series of studies address the short-term effects of semantic priming on memory retrieval. The usual effect of presenting primes meaningfully related to target information is to facilitate memory retrieval of that target information, but we have been concerned with understanding the inhibitory effects of such semantically related primes. These inhibitory effects pose an interesting challenge to associative theories postulating spreading activation, which usually predict positive priming effects. They may also be related to word finding difficulties in the aged, who often perseverate on related words when seeking a target word, and to dyslexia, since one test for it involves a task that may involve inhibitory priming effects. Second, in a related series of studies we plan to examine retrieval difficulties provoked by primes that are graphemically or phonemically similar to a target. Studies in this section are an attempt to document better this phenomenon with several new paradigms, but later studies will permit a more intensive attack on problems of interest to cognitive psychologists, such as the representation of concepts and names in bilinguals' memories and the representation of pictures. In a third section we outline new research to follow up on insights derived from a different sort of priming with amnesic (usually brain damaged) patients. These patients will often show losses in retention when measured by tasks using conscious recollection (recall and recognition), but intact retention when measured by more subtle transfer task measuring priming and savings. The third series of experiments is directed at the general question of the nature of the codes supporting such intact performance in amnesics and normals. The present research should have implications for (a) the role of semantic context in reading, (b) retrieval blocks and failures, particularly in the aged (and dyslexic), (c) representation of information in amnesia and other dissociated states, and (d) cognitive representation in alternative coding systems (different languages, different modalities).
Showing the most recent 10 out of 14 publications
