Acquisition of novel traces in short-term implicit memory: Priming for nonwords and new associations

McKone (1995) reported a short-lived repetition priming effect (up to 8 sec and three intervening items), superimposed on long-term priming. in lexica l decision and naming, decay of this short-term implicit memory was faster for pseudowords than for words, suggesting an explanation in terms of trans ient activation of preexisting lexical representations. Here, we present tw o cases where, in contrast, preexperimental familiarity did not affect shor t-term priming, indicating acquisition of novel traces. Experiment 1 determ ined repetition priming in same-different judgments to lowercase-uppercase pairs for words, and for nonwords with three levels of wordlikeness. Across lags of 0, 1, and 6 intervening items (2-14 sec), short-term priming was t he same for all stimuli, even random letter strings. Experiments 2 and 3 as sessed priming in a double lexical decision task for old associations (oran ge-apple) and new associations (cigar-errand). Short-term priming for the a ssociation was equal in both cases.