The Alliance between Semantic Memory, Priming, and Episodic Memory

Categorization tasks are often used in priming studies, although the impact of categories has seldom been evaluated. We asked participants to classify natural images of animals belonging to four different categories. These were bovid, cats, rodents, and monkeys. The study consisted of three parts: learning, testing, and recognition. Participants responded faster during testing than learning, but this effect was mainly found in one category: rodents. At recognition, rodent target images resulted in a higher correct recognition rate than the other categories. These results suggest that prior semantic knowledge influences behavioral priming and priming influences formation of episodic memory.