Ms. Weldon et Jl. Jacksonbarrett, WHY DO PICTURES PRODUCE PRIMING ON THE WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION TEST - A STUDY OF ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL FACTORS, Memory & cognition, 21(4), 1993, pp. 519-528
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).