DISSOCIATING CONCEPTUAL PRIMING, PERCEPTUAL PRIMING AND EXPLICIT MEMORY

A distinction has recently been drawn between two forms of implicit tests, one sensitive to perceptual factors (implicit perceptual tests) and another sensitive to semantic factors (implicit conceptual tests). In two experiments, we examined the statistical relation between performance on an implicit perceptual test (kanji fragment completion test - a new test described in this article), on an implicit conceptual test (category association test) and on an explicit memory test (recognition). Stochastic independence was observed between the implicit perceptual and the explicit tests, between the two implicit tests (Experiment 1), and between the implicit conceptual and the explicit tests (Experiment 2). These results lend support to the distinction between perceptual and conceptual forms of priming.