DATA-DRIVEN PROCESSING AND PRIMING EFFECTS IN A WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION TASK

An experiment was designed to examine the role and importance of data- driven processing in an implicit memory task: Word-fragment completion . We investigated the effects of priming and manipulating the context in which the target words had been read. Three main results emerged. F irst, replicating MacLeod's experiment (1989), we found that there was a very small priming effect for words previously studied in a text. S econd, the magnitude of the priming effect increased with the perceptu al difficulty of information intake during reading. Third, these varia tions in priming for the texts were functionally independent of subjec ts' recall of the text read. These results suggest that data-driven pr ocessing plays a critical role in priming. They are consistent with th e transfer-appropriate processing theory recently advocated by Roedige r, Weldon, and Challis (1989).