Awareness and intentionality of priming for associations between two words: Effects of instructions, distraction and attention

This study investigates priming effects of words linked in new associations, according to direct or indirect instructions given to the participants, and to the conditions of distraction, and attention, during the test. In experiment 1, indirect instructions of a word stem completion test and the retrieval intentionality criterion of Schacter, Bowers and Booker (1989) were applied. During the study phase, the participants were asked to build sentences with 24 pairs of words (a context-word and a cue-word) not semantically or phonologically previously linked. During the test phase, 36 or 48 three-letter strings, associated or not with the same context-word as during the study phase, had to be completed by the first word which came to mind. The conceptual priming effects of new associations have been obtained only by the participants aware of the link between the study phase and the test phase, and subject to few distractive items, while the perceptual priming effects of the three-letter strings have been observed whatever the conditions of consciousness and distraction. In the second experiment, direct instructions of the process dissociation framework (Jacoby, 1991) were given with the same material as in experiment 1. A second task of sound detection allowed to study the effects of the division of the attention during the test. The conceptual priming effects of the association essentially depended on the intentional processes of retrieval, while in the perceptual priming of the three-letter chain the estimate use of automatic and intentional processes was not different. In addition, the use of intentional and automatic processes was sensitive to the division of attention during the test. Priming effects seem to depend on the information availability, regardless of the instructions. Awareness of participants has led to different sensitivity to the contextual information. Involvement of automatic or intentional processes appears to depend on contextual information and available resources during the retrieval. Intentionality has led to sensitivity in the contextual information, which is also connected in the conditions of attention. Conclusions support the interpretation regarding multidimensional and episodic representation in memory, without necessarily resorting to separate memory systems. (C) 2014 Societe francaise de psychologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.