Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Four experiments are presented that demonstrate that mediated priming (e.g., lion stripes) does not rely on weak, although direct, semantic relationships or lexical co-occurrence as suggested by McKoon and Ratcliff (1992). A view of mediation in priming consistent with a distributed view of memory is presented that relies on shared contexts between the prime and target. Not all mediated items appear to share contexts, and ones that do not also do not show mediated priming. The focus on contextual mediation is consistent with how word meanings are acquired as modeled by the HAL memory model.