PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL PRIMING IN AMNESIC AND ALCOHOLIC PATIENTS

This study investigated the contribution of perceptual and conceptual processes to the repetition priming effect, and evaluated alternative theoretical positions about repetition priming in amnesic patients. To ward this end, we administered three repetition priming tasks (Stem Co mpletion, Word Identification and Free Association) and an explicit me mory task (yes/no Recognition) to amnesic and alcoholic patients, and tested the sensitivity of these tasks to level of processing and to ma nipulations of presentation modality. Experiment 1 demonstrated that t he level of priming in Stem Completion and Free Association (but not i n Word Identification) was enhanced by semantic elaboration of the sti muli. Experiment 2 revealed that the magnitude of priming in Word Iden tification and Stem Completion (but not in Free Association) was large r in the intramodal then in the intermodal condition. Amnesic patients displayed normal perceptual as well conceptual priming. Possible inte rpretations of these results according to theoretical models that dist inguish memory tasks along an explicit-implicit dichotomy (multiple me mory system theory), or on the basis of the extent to which they depen d upon perceptual or conceptual processing (transfer-appropriate proce dures approach), or that assumes a possible contamination of priming p erformance by explicit strategies of retrieval are discussed.