Making sense of memory.

The current work explores how people make recognition and belief judgments in the presence of obvious repetition primes. In two experiments, subjects received a 200-ms prime ("cheetah"), either before or after reading a trivia question ("What is the fastest animal?") but always before being presented with the target answer ("cheetah"). Results showed that repetition priming decreased "old" claims (Recognition--Experiment 1), while it increased truth claims (Belief--Experiment 2). Furthermore, repetition prime placement affected recognition but not belief. Combined, these results suggest that dissociations in memory performance are a natural outcome of task and processing demands and reflect the dynamic, flexible nature of memory.