Associative Repetition Priming: A Selective Review and Theoretical Implications

This chapter argues that associative repetition priming is of interest not only from an empirical perspective, but also from a more theoretical perspective. The second part of this chapter discusses some examples of how the finding of associative repetition priming can be used to answer some fundamental questions concerning the representation of knowledge in memory and the retrieval of knowledge from memory. More specifically, it addresses three issues that have been raised in the literature. The first issue is whether or not the findings from the associative priming literature provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that there are separate episodic and semantic memory systems. The second issue is whether associative priming is subject to interference. A final issue concerns the question whether priming in the standard associative priming paradigm depends on associative or on semantic relations between words.