Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A series of experiments are presented that replicate the mediated priming effect (e.g., lion-stripes) using a naming latency task, and demonstrates that mediated priming does not rely on weak, but direct, semantic relationships or lexical co-occurrence as suggested by McKoon and Ratchff (1992). The magnitude of mediated priming is not negatively correlated with either semantic relatedness or lexical co-occurrence as McKoon and Ratcliff would predict. Furthermore, we show that differences in the contextual nature of the prime - target pairs affects whether or not mediated priming occurs. These findings are discussed in the context of the HAL memory model suggesting a view of "mediated" priming that is more consistent with a distributed representational view.