Separating consciously controlled and automatic influences in memory for new associations

The process dissociation paradigm was applied to investigate the contributions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to the repetition priming effect for new associations, under elaborative encoding (Experiments 1 and 2) and copy instructions (Experiment 3). Semantically unrelated context-target word pairs were presented during study, and context words and stems were presented during test. Target word stems were paired with the same context words as at study (intact), paired with different context words from study (recombined), or were the stems of unstudied words (control). Participants had to complete stems with the first word that came to mind (indirect), with studied words (inclusion), or with new, unstudied words (exclusion). Results indicated that consciously controlled processes mediated the associative repetition effect under elaborative encoding, whereas automatic processes were implicated under copy instructions.