Priming effects in word-fragment completion for short- and long-term retention intervals

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the priming effect in word-fragment completion for intervals from 1 min to 5 weeks. In Experiment I, 36 subjects studied a list of 90 words. Then either recognition or fragment completion test was performed after 8 min, 1 week, and 5 weeks. Recognition memory showed significant decrement over the intervals. In contrast, performance in fragment completion test showed almost no change up to the 1-week retention interval. It was not until 5-week later that it showed about 10 percent decrease. That is to say, priming effect lasted for such long interval. In Experiment II, a list of 75 words were studied by 48 subjects. Only fragment completion test was done after 1 min, 1 h, and 1 week. The results showed that priming effect in fragment completion remained unchanged for the intervals. This suggests that the priming effect in word-fragment completion may be retained for a fairly long term (at least 5 weeks), and the cognitive system may use some other kind of information which is different from episodic memory.