The experimental psychology society prize lecture - Associative priming inPavlovian conditioning

Any occasion on which an animal is placed in an experimental setting or con text and receives pairings of one event with another provides the opportuni ty for a variety of associative structures to be acquired. These structures range from simple associations, which allow the presentation of one event to activate or prime a memory of the other, to hierarchical associations, w hich allow a simple association to he primed by some other event (e.g. the context in which the simple association was acquired). Experiments with rat s that reveal priming effects consistent with both of these putative associ ative structures are reviewed.