Participants completed a battery of 3 attentional control (AC) tasks (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop, as in Hutchison, 2007) and performed a lexical decision task with symmetrically associated (e.g., "sister-brother") and asymmetrically related primes and targets presented in both the forward (e.g., "atom-bomb") and backward…

Three forced-choice perceptual word identification experiments tested the claim that transitions from positive to negative priming as a function of increasing prime duration are due to cognitive aftereffects. These aftereffects are similar in nature to perceptual aftereffects that produce a negative image due to overexposure and habituation to a…

The hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease (AD) degrades semantic representations predicts that AD qualitatively alters spontaneous thoughts. In two experiments contrasting free associations to words with strong (e.g., "bride-groom") versus weak (e.g., "body-leg") associates participants with AD produced less common responses (e.g., "bride-pretty")…

Examines the latency of associative activation in memory by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime word and a test word, thereby establishing the minimum SOA needed to produce a significant associative priming effect on lexical decision times. (Author/RK)