Convergent behavioral and neuropsychological evidence for a distinction between identification and production forms of repetition priming

Four experiments examined a distinction between kinds of repetition priming which involve either the identification of the form or meaning of a stimul us or the production of a response on the basis of a cue. Patients with Alz heimer's disease had intact priming on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks and impaired priming on word-stem completion and cate gory-exemplar production tasks. Division of study-phase attention in health y participants reduced priming on word-stem completion and category-exempla r production tasks but not on picture-naming and category-exemplar identifi cation tasks. The parallel dissociations in normal and abnormal memory cann ot be explained by implicit-explicit or perceptual-conceptual distinctions but are explained by an identification-production distinction. There may be separable cognitive and neural bases for implicit modulation of identifica tion and production forms of knowledge.