Priming of visual and functional knowledge on a semantic classification task

Several lines of evidence suggest that semantic memory may be organized according to domain-specific attributes (e.g., visual or functional). Repetition priming both within and across these semantic knowledge domains was measured in 4 experiments to determine whether retrieval of one attribute can occur independently of retrieval of other attributes. The authors found a strong same-attribute priming advantage that persisted even when the classification task differed between study and test. Also evident was a small but consistent cross-attribute priming effect. Cross-attribute priming was not affected by changes in the modality of the test item, suggesting that the effect reflects the repetition of conceptual, and not perceptual, processes. On the basis of these results, the authors suggest that conceptual priming reflects the recapitulation of both domain-specific and nonspecific semantic processing.