Associative repetition priming 1 Running head: Associative Repetition Priming Associative repetition priming: A selective review and theoretical implications René Zeelenberg University of Amsterdam Diane Pecher Utrecht University and Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers University of Amsterdam Send correspondence to: René Zeelenberg Psychology Department Associative repetition priming 2 Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 USA phone: 001-812-856-5217 fax: 001-812-855-1086 email:
[email protected] Associative repetition priming 3 A. Introduction An extensive body of research in the last two decades has shown that recent experiences can affect performance even when subjects are not instructed to remember these earlier experiences and even when subjects are not aware of these experiences. These so-called implicit memory phenomena are usually demonstrated by the repetition priming effect. Repetition priming refers to the finding that responses are faster and more accurate to stimuli that have been encountered recently than to stimuli that have not been encountered recently. For example, in a perceptual word identification task (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981; Salasoo, Shiffrin & Feustel, 1985) subjects can more often correctly identify the briefly flashed target word if they have recently studied the target than if they have not studied the target. Comparable effects have been obtained in tasks such as picture identification (e.g., Rouder, Ratcliff & McKoon, 2000), word stem completion (e.g., Graf, Squire, & Mandler, 1984) and lexical decision (e.g., Bowers & Michita, 1998; Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977), to name but a few. The large majority of studies in the domain of implicit memory have concentrated on the effect of repeating stimuli in isolation. In the common repetition priming paradigm stimuli are presented one-by-one both during the study phase and the test phase.