Subthreshold Priming and Memory Monitoring

Priming is thought to produce a nonconscious form of human memory. This form of memory has been intensively studied over the past 15 years, and recently Tulving and Schacter (1990) proposed it as a subsystem of human memory on a par with procedural, semantic, and episodic memory. The relation between this nonconscious form of memory and metacognitive judgments derived from conscious introspection has also been an issue of recent study. This chapter describes research concerning the influence of subthreshold as well as conscious priming on (1) recall, (2) subjective evaluation of knowing answers to questions, and (3) subjective evaluation of learning. The empirical findings show different patterns of results for evaluations of knowing and evaluations of learning. A theory is presented that explains these patterns in terms of differences in putative strategies used to relate the evaluations of knowing and learning to later performance tests.