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Two experiments investigated semantic priming effects in a modified version of the Dagenbach, Carr, and Barnhardt (1990) rare-word paradigm. After learning a list of rare words to a criterion of 50% recall, subjects participated in a lexical decision task in which the rare words served as primes. When the targets were associatively related to the primes, lexical decision responses were facilitated following recalled definitions and inhibited following unrecalled definitions. When the targets were synonyms of the rare words, facilitation occurred following both recalled and unrecalled definitions. The results were interpreted as supporting a center-surround model of attentional retrieval that may serve an adaptive role in new learning.

In response to Greenwald's article on contemporary research on unconscious mental processes, the authors address three issues: (a) the independence of much recent research and theory from psychodynamic formulations; (b) the broad sweep of the psychological unconscious, including implicit perception, memory, thought, learning, and emotion; and (c) the possibility that the analytic power of unconscious processing may depend both on the manner in which mental contents are rendered unconscious and the manner in which they are to be processed.