ABSTRACT
Evidence is reviewed for bias and discriminative mechanisms in cuing or priming of item and associative memory. Bias (or constant increment) effects of priming dominate recognition performance for simple situations involving two items, a prime and a test for item familiarity. When a prime cues recognition of associative information or when multiple primes cue recognition of items, discriminative, holistic ensemble effects dominate. Both patterns are consistent with a weighted decisions model based on a holistic priming ensemble and a task part. Both patterns depend on separate memory representations for compounds and their subparts— consistent with the separate item and compound associative representations in Murdock's model of memory.
