Priming of visual and functional knowledge on a semantic classification task

Several lines of evidence suggest that semantic memory may be organized acc ording to domain-specific attributes (e.g., visual or functional). Repetiti on priming both within and across these semantic knowledge domains was meas ured in 4 experiments to determine whether retrieval of one attribute can o ccur independently of retrieval of other attributes. The authors found a st rong same-attribute priming advantage that persisted even when the classifi cation task differed between study and test. Also evident was a small but c onsistent cross-attribute priming effect. Cross-attribute priming was not a ffected by changes in the modality of the test item, suggesting that the ef fect reflects the repetition of conceptual, and not perceptual, processes. On the basis of these results, the authors suggest that conceptual priming reflects the recapitulation of both domain-specific and nonspecific semanti c processing.