Implicit and explicit memory for new associations in normal and amnesic subjects.

Two experiments examined whether repetition priming effects on a word completion task are influenced by new associations between unrelated word pairs that were established during a single study trial. On the word completion task, subjects were presented with the initial three letters of the response words from the study list pairs and they completed these fragments with the first words that came to mind. The fragments were shown either with the paired words from the study list (same context) or with other words (different context). Both experiments showed a larger priming effect in the same-context condition than in the different-context condition, but only with a study task that required elaborative processing of the word pairs. This effect was observed with college students and amnesic patients, suggesting that word completion performance is mediated by implicit memory for new associations that is independent of explicit recollection.