Prior presentation of a word can serve to enhance its later perceptual identification. A series of three experiments was designed to determine if this effect of prior experience depends on preserving the visual details of a word between its prior presentation and test. A first experiment revealed evidence of specific visual transfer only for words that were tested in lowercase. Words tested in lowercase that had been previously presented in lowercase were more readily identified than were those that had been previously presented in uppercase. Later experiments used more extreme manipulations of the visual details of a word in an attempt to maximize specific visual transfer. Results of the experiments are discussed in terms of the role of memory for visual details in word identification along with the possibility that perception can rely on memory for prior episodes.

Seven experiments examined the time course of primed fragment-completion performance. A pilot experiment and Experiment 1 showed that rapid forgetting occurs immediately after study for a period of approximately 5 min. The rate of this immediate forgetting is independent of the length of the list. Experiment 2 showed that priming effects were still present after 16 months. Experiments 3 and 4 provided further evidence of forgetting over 1 week. Experiment 5 showed that retention performance after 20 min is unaffected by the interpolated study and recall of other lists of words. Experiment 6 showed that 10-min retention performance was substantially reduced as list length was increased from 10 to 100 words; but it showed no evidence of intralist proactive interference. The combined results of the seven experiments illustrate some similarities and differences between forgetting in primed fragment completion and in episodic memory tasks such as recall and recognition.

An investigation of perceptual priming and semantic learning in the severely amnesic subject K.C. is reported. He was taught 64 three-word sentences and tested for his ability to produce the final word of each sentence. Despite a total lack of episodic memory, he exhibited (a) strong perceptual priming effects in word-fragment completion, which were retained essentially in full strength for 12 months, and (b) independent of perceptual priming, learning of new semantic facts, many of which were also retained for 12 months. K.C.'s semantic learning may be at least partly attributable to repeated study trials and minimal interference during learning. The findings suggest that perceptual priming and semantic learning are subserved by two memory systems different from episodic memory and that both systems (perceptual representation and semantic memory) are at least partially preserved in some amnesic subjects.

Research has consistently demonstrated that performance is degraded when participants engage in two simultaneous tasks that require the same working memory resources. This study tested predictions from working memory theory to investigate the effects of eye movement (EM) on the components of autobiographical memory. In two experiments, 24 and 36 participants, respectively, focused on negative memories while engaging in three dual-attention EM tasks of increasing complexity. Compared to No-EM, Slow-EM and Fast-EM produced significantly decreased ratings of image vividness, thought clarity, and emotional intensity, and the more difficult Fast-EM resulted in larger decreases than did Slow-EM. The effects on emotional intensity were not consistent, with some preliminary evidence that a focus on memory-related thought might maintain emotional intensity during simple dual-attention tasks (Slow-EM, No-EM). The findings of our experiments support a working memory explanation for the effects of EM dual-attention tasks on autobiographical memory. Implications for understanding the mechanisms of action in EMDR are discussed.

Explanations of context effects in the Reicher-Wheeler task and the letter-identification task appeal to word-based processing, yet these tasks provide no explicit measure of word processing. An experiment is reported which was designed to investigate the use of transfer in the wordidentification task as a measure of word-based processing in letter-identification tasks. It was found that encoding manipulations that determined whether a word-superiority effect was or was not found in a letter-identification task (e.g., Thompson & Massaro, 1973)also determined whether transfer was or was not found in a subsequent word-identification task. The results of the experiment are discussed in terms of the utility of using transfer experiments as converging evidence about the presence and/or absence of processes that cannot be directly measured in other experimental paradigms.Experimental investigations have demonstrated that a letter in a word is processed differently than a letter by itself (Estes, 1975;Reicher, 1969;Wheeler, 1970). In these studies, the presence of a word context facilitated the detection of constituent letters. Recent accounts of this effect have invoked processing that is based on specific and known words (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981;Paap, Newsome, McDonald, & Schvaneveldt, 1982;Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982). However, because these studies did not include an independent measure of word processing, the evidence for operations associated with specific words is indirect. The purpose of the present research was to provide such an independent measure. To do so, we used performance in the word-identification task (see Jacoby & Dallas, 1981) as an index of word processing in a prior letter-identification task. To the extent that transfer from the letter-identification task to the wordidentification task can be shown to be limited to those conditions in which there is a word advantage in letter identification, such differential transfer provides converging evidence that processing associated with specific words mediates the perception of a letter in a word.The sensitivity of the word-identification task makes it a good candidate as a measure of word processing (e.g., Morton, 1979). In this task, subjects are required to name words presented in a degraded fashion, and performance is measured in terms of the proportion of words correctly Preparation of this article was supported by an NSERC grant to the second author. We thank Carol A. Macdonald for comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Ann Hollingshead for general assistance. Requests for reprints may be sent to