Stimulus encoding and the relationship between stimulus recognition and association formation

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the relation between stimulus recognition and association formation. Subjects learned to associate trigram-digit or trigram-word pairs by either study-associative matching or study-recall procedures. Following training, subjects were given a stimulus recognition and matching or recall task. Stimulus recognition was facilitated when the trigrams were paired with representative words but not with digit responses. The probability of response recall, given nonrecognition of the stimulus, was above chance with the trigram-word pairs but not with the trigram-digit pairs, suggesting that subjects need only to retrieve an encoded version of the nominal stimulus in order to have access to response recall.