The influence of task requirements on priming in object decision and matching

We argue that task requirements can be the determinant in generating differ ent results in studies on visual object recognition. We investigated primin g for novel visual objects in three implicit memory tasks. A study-test des ign was employed in which participants first viewed line drawings of unfami liar objects and later made different decisions about structural aspects of the objects. Priming for both symmetric and asymmetric possible objects wa s observed in a task requiring a judgment of structural possibility. Howeve r, when the task was changed to one requiring a judgment of structural symm etry, only symmetric possible objects showed priming. Finally, in a matchin g task in which participants made a same-different judgment, only symmetric possible objects exhibited priming. These results suggest that an understa nding of object representation will be most fruitful if it is based on care ful analyses of both the task demands and their interaction(s) with encodin g and retrieval processes.