Seven experiments examined the time course of primed fragment-completion performance. A pilot experiment and Experiment 1 showed that rapid forgetting occurs immediately after study for a period of approximately 5 min. The rate of this immediate forgetting is independent of the length of the list. Experiment 2 showed that priming effects were still present after 16 months. Experiments 3 and 4 provided further evidence of forgetting over 1 week. Experiment 5 showed that retention performance after 20 min is unaffected by the interpolated study and recall of other lists of words. Experiment 6 showed that 10-min retention performance was substantially reduced as list length was increased from 10 to 100 words; but it showed no evidence of intralist proactive interference. The combined results of the seven experiments illustrate some similarities and differences between forgetting in primed fragment completion and in episodic memory tasks such as recall and recognition.

An experiment is described in which subjects (N = 106) studied unique names of famous individuals, such as ISAAC NEWTON and GEORGE WASHINGTON, and unique geographic names, such as TORONTO and STOCKHOLM, in the context of descriptive phrases. In a subsequent recognition test of the names in the absence of their study context, subjects failed to recognize many names that they could recall in the presence of the study context. These results (a) demonstrate the generality of the phenomenon of recognition failure of recallable words, (b) limit Muter's (1984) claim that unique names of famous people constitute an exception to the function, and (c) provide further support for an empirical law concerning the relation between recognition and recall.

Subjects saw or heard words in a list (e.g. limerick) and then took two successive tests. The first was a yes/no recognition test in which auditory/visual modality of test words was manipulated orthogonally to the study modality. The second test varied with experimental conditions: subjects produced words to either perceptual (fragment) cues (l- -e-ick) or conceptual cues (What name is given to a lighthearted five-line poem?), under either explicit or implicit retrieval instructions. The major findings were: (a) that regardless of the type of retrieval cue (perceptual or conceptual) the degree of dependency between recognition and cued recall was greater than that between recognition and implicit retrieval; and (b) that modality shifts adversely affected perceptually cued explicit and implicit retrieval, whereas they had no effect either on conceptually cued retrieval or on recognition. These results suggest that the memory system subserving, and the processes involved in, conceptual priming differ from those underlying recognition and perceptual priming.

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