Huber, D. E., Clark, T., Curran, T., & Winkielman, P. (in press). Effects of repetition priming on recognition memory: Testing a perceptual fluency-disfluency model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Five experiments explored the effects of immediate repetition priming on episodic recognition (the Jacoby-Whitehouse paradigm) as measured with forced choice testing, thereby eliminating changes due to criterion shifts. These experiments confirmed key predictions of a model adapted from Huber and O’Reilly’s (2003) dynamic neural network of perception. In this model, short prime durations pre-activate primed items, enhancing perceptual fluency and familiarity, whereas long prime durations saturate primed items through habituation, causing perceptual disfluency and less familiarity. Short duration primes produced a recognition preference for primed words (Experiments 1, 2, & 5) whereas long duration primes produced a preference against primed words (Experiments 3, 4, & 5). Experiment 2 found prime duration effects even when participants accurately identified short duration primes. A cued recall task included in Experiments 3, 4 & 5 found priming effects only for recognition trials that were followed by cued recall failure (familiarity based). Because this happened even with long duration primes, this suggests that excessive priming lowers familiarity. Experiment 4 provided a manipulation check on this result through a delay manipulation that preferentially affected recognition followed by cued recall success.