States of awareness following word stem completion

Abstract

Two experiments are described that examine states of conscious awareness following word stem completion priming and cued recall. Experiment 1 showed that a proportion of correctly produced target words in implicit stem completion became available to conscious awareness as measured by “remember” and “know” responses, when subjects were made test aware. Experiment 2 showed opposite effects on the implicit and explicit tasks while holding retrieval cues constant, thereby satisfying Bowers and Schacter's (1990) retrieval intentionality criterion. A read superiority effect in word stem completion which contrasted with the generation effect in cued recall was shown to correspond mainly with completed stems of which subjects were test unaware. These results suggest that functional dissociations in tests of implicit memory may correspond with subjects’ state of awareness.