ABSTRACT
Associations between words can be asymmetrical. For example, light is frequently listed as an associate of lamp, whereas lamp rarely appears as an associate of light (Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber, 1991). Backward priming refers to the situation in which the association from prime to target is weak but the association from target to prime is strong (e.g., light-lamp). Koriat (1981) was the first to investigate backward priming, and he obtained equal amounts of priming in the forward (e.g., lamp-light) and the backward (e.g., light-lamp) directions. This result is surprising, because if priming depends on strength of association, it should be larger in the forward than in the backward direction.
