WHY DO PICTURES PRODUCE PRIMING ON THE WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION TEST - A STUDY OF ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL FACTORS

Three experiments examined why pictures produce priming on the word-fr agment completion test, despite the fact that there is no match betwee n the physical features of the picture and the word fragment. Pictures and words were presented as primes, and performance on the word-fragm ent completion test was measured; encoding and retrieval conditions we re varied. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the role of picture labeling b y increasing the presentation rate and by introducing a shadowing task during encoding; labeling appears to play a role in priming. In Exper iment 3, the word fragments were presented for 500 msec, and subjects were required to provide a solution immediately. Word priming was unaf fected, but picture priming was eliminated, suggesting that word fragm ents enable efficient recovery of perceptually similar primes (i.e., w ords), but slower and less direct recovery of conceptually similar but physically dissimilar primes (i.e., pictures).