The decay of short-term implicit memory: unpacking lag.

McKone (1995) reported a short-lived repetition priming effect, superimposed on long-lived priming. This short-term implicit memory survived a few intervening items and several seconds for words but decayed precipitously for nonwords, producing a lag x lexicality interaction. Here, mechanisms of decay are studied by disconfounding the time delay and interference components of lag. In Experiment 1, time delay was varied while number of intervening items was held constant, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, priming was plotted as a function of time delay, with and without intervening items. Using a lexical decision task, both experiments found independent contributions of time and interference to the decay of short-term priming. Further, Experiment 2 attributed the lag x lexicality interaction to a particular sensitivity of nonword traces to interference. An illustration of how these effects might arise in the word recognition system is provided.