Measuring associative strength: Category-item associations and their activation from memory

Three measures of the strength of association between a category and member s of the category were investigated: (a) a naming measure, in which the par ticipants (93 undergraduates),were asked to list the members of a category and the listing order was assumed to reflect associative strength; (b) a la tency measure, which assessed the latency to correctly identify specific it ems as members or nonmembers of a given category; and (c) a facilitation me asure, in which the spontaneous activation of an item upon presentation of a category label as a prime was assessed by considering the extent to which the prime facilitated recognition of an initially degraded (visually obscu red) item. The three measures correlated substantially, thus validating the naming and latency measures as reasonable approximations of the likelihood that a given item will receive activation in memory when the category is p resented. Many of the constructs of interest to survey researchers can be v iewed similarly as associations in memory, and the naming and latency measu res can be fruitfully used in surveys; research attesting to the utility of naming and latency data is reviewed.