Priming effects that span an intervening unrelated word: implications for models of memory representation and retrieval.

Several studies have reported priming effects that span an intervening unrelated word (Davelaar & Coltheart, 1975; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1972). More recently, other investigators have suggested that such relatedness effects are the result of postaccess processes (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox, 1981; Masson, 1991; Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988). In fact, these investigators claim that when procedures are used that discourage the use of postaccess processes, relatedness effects do not span intervening unrelated words. The present experiments demonstrate reliable relatedness effects with procedures that eliminate postaccess processes. These results are consistent with the notion of spreading activation among local representations in memory. Implications for the issue of local versus distributed representations are discussed.