Theories of priming: I. Associative distance and lag.

Automatic associative priming occurs in a large number or memory retrieval tasks, including semantic categorization, lexical decisions, item recognition, naming, and judgments or spatial location. Priming has been commonly attributed to one or the other of 2 alternative mechanisms: spreading activation or construction or compound retrieval cues. This article reports the results or 3 experiments that were designed to test spreading-activation and non-spreading-activation models or priming. The findings were consistent with the spreading-activation models, but inconsistent with the non-spreading-activation models. These results suggest that a rejection of spreading-activation mechanisms is premature