SEPARATING CONSCIOUSLY CONTROLLED AND AUTOMATIC INFLUENCES IN MEMORY FOR NEW ASSOCIATIONS

The process dissociation paradigm was applied to investigate the contr ibutions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to the repe tition priming effect for new associations, under elaborative encoding (Experiments 1 and 2) and copy instructions (Experiment 3). Semantica lly unrelated context-target word pairs were presented during study, a nd context words and stems were presented during test. Target word ste ms were paired with the same context words as at study (intact), paire d with different context words from study (recombined), or were the st ems of unstudied words (control). Participants had to complete stems w ith the first word that came to mind (indirect), with studied words (i nclusion), or with new, unstudied words (exclusion). Results indicated that consciously controlled processes mediated the associative repeti tion effect under elaborative encoding, whereas automatic processes we re implicated under copy instructions.