Evidence for a Selective Influence of Short-Term Experiences on the Retrieval of Item-Specific Long-Term Bindings

Human behavior is guided by prior experience such as bindings between stimuli and responses. Experimentally, this is evident in performance changes when features of the stimulus-response episode reoccur either in the short-term or in the long-term. So far, effects of short-term and long-term bindings are assumed to be independent from one another. In a large-scale re-analysis of eight item-specific stimulus-response priming experiments that orthogonally varied task-specific classifications and actions in the short-term (trial N-1 to trial N) and, item-specifically, in the long-term (lag of several trials), we tested this independence assumption. In detail, we tested whether short-term experiences (repetitions of classification and action features in two consecutive trials) affected the retrieval of item-specific long-term stimulus-classification (S-C) and stimulus-action (S-A) bindings as well as potential long-term C-A bindings. The retrieval of item-specific long-term S-C bindings (i.e., the size of item-specific S-C priming effects) was affected by the persisting activation of classifications from trial N-1 (short-term priming). There were no further interactions between short-term experiences and long-term bindings. These results suggest a feature-specific, selective influence of short-term priming on long-term binding retrieval (e.g., based on shared feature representations). In contrast, however, we found evidence against an influence of short-term C-A bindings on long-term binding retrieval. This finding suggests that the processes contributing to short-term priming and long-term binding retrieval are dissociable from short-term binding and retrieval processes. Our results thus inform current theories on how short-term and long-term bindings are bound and retrieved (e.g., the BRAC framework).