Autobiographical memories prime semantic memories on conceptual implicit memory tasks

Research has shown that the activation of semantic memories leads to the activation of autobiographical memories. Known as semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming, it has been argued that this form of priming reflects the functional role that autobiographical memory has in semantic processing. It has also been argued that if this proposition is true, one should see the reverse form of priming, autobiographical-to-semantic memory priming. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the priming effects of autobiographical memory retrieval on two conceptual priming tasks, category exemplar generation and word association. In two experiments, participants recalled autobiographical memories in response to cue words (e.g., beach, cat, strawberry, etc.), and they were subsequently given a category exemplar-generation task (Experiment 1) or a word-association task (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments showed that autobiographical memory retrieval led to significant priming on the conceptual tasks (relative to control conditions), and priming following autobiographical memory retrieval was as strong as priming following semantic processing (i.e., word familiarity judgments). The results support the notion of autobiographical-to-semantic memory priming, and taken with the results of semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming observed in other studies, they also show that priming between autobiographical memory and semantic memory is bidirectional. The results also support the idea that autobiographical memories have a functional role in semantic processing.