A generation effect in memory without awareness

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Abstract
Priming refers to the facilitatory effects of a prior experience on the performance of some cognitive task or skill. In a word‐fragment completion task, priming is shown if words from a previously presented study list are more likely to be completed than other words. An experiment is described which shows that priming in word‐fragment completion was enhanced for words that had been generated at study, from the same fragments as those used at test, rather than read. Because subjects were unaware that any memory test occurred, this generation effect in primed fragment completion does not depend on conscious recollection. It is argued that the effect arises in some memory system other than episodic memory, and reflects data‐driven rather than conceptually driven processing.

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