Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 1999, Vol. 128, No. 4,479-498 Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0096-3445/99/S3.00 Convergent Behavioral and Neuropsychological Evidence for a Distinction Between Identification and Production Forms of Repetition Priming John D. E. Gabriel! Stanford University and Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Maria Stone Stanford University and Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Sharon L. Thompson-Schill Stanford University Jared R. Tinklenberg and Jerome A. Yesavage Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System and Stanford University School of Medicine Chandan J. Vaidya Stanford University Wendy S. Francis Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Debra A. Fleischman Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Robert S. Wilson Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center Four experiments examined a distinction between kinds of repetition priming which involve either the identification of the form or meaning of a stimulus or the production of a response on the basis of a cue. Patients with Alzheimer's disease had intact priming on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks and impaired priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks. Division of study-phase attention in healthy participants reduced priming on word-stem completion and category-exemplar production tasks but not on picture-naming and category-exemplar identification tasks. The parallel dissociations in normal and abnormal memory cannot be explained by implicit-explicit or perceptual- conceptual distinctions but are explained by an identification-production distinction. There may be separable cognitive and neural bases for implicit modulation of identification and production forms of knowledge. The distinction between explicit and implicit retrieval in tests of memory has become a focus of intense research because it may reveal how the functional neural architecture of memory subserves and constrains human learning. Ex- plicit retrieval is invoked in the conscious remembrance of events and facts (Graf & Schacter, 1985) and is measured by tests that make direct (M. K. Johnson & Hasher, 1987) reference to prior experience, such as tests of recall or recognition. Implicit retrieval occurs incidentally in the course of task performance and is measured indirectly by changes in performance that can be attributed to prior experience with a task or a stimulus. Such memory can be measured by delay classical-conditioning, skill-learning, or repetition-priming tasks that make no reference, at the time John D. E. Gabrieli and Maria Stone, Department of Psychology, Stanford University and Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center; Chandan J. Vaidya and Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, Department of Psychology, Stanford University; Wendy S. Francis, Debra A. Fleischman, and Robert S. Wilson, Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush- Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center; Jared R. Tinklenberg and Jerome A. Yesavage, Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System, Palo Alto, California, and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine. Maria Stone is now at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Wendy S. Francis is now at the Department of Psychology, Stanford University. Sharon L. Thompson-Schill is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania. This research was supported by Grant nRG-89-081 from the Alzheimer's Association and a grant from the Alzheimer's Disease Research Fund of the Illinois Department of Public Health to Northwestern University; National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke Grant 1P50NS26985 to Boston University; National Institute on Aging (NLA) Grant AGO9466 to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center; NIA Grant RO1AG11121 to Stanford University; the Medical Research Service of the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System; and the Department of Veterans Affairs Sierra-Pacific Mental Illness Research Educational and Clinical Center. We thank Barbara Eubeler for assistance in identifying and recruiting participants in Experiment 1, Marion Zabinski for her help with the manuscript and in executing Experiment 2, Laura Rabin for help in executing Experiment 2, and Benjamin Jacobson and Nusha Askari for help in executing Experiment 4. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John D. E. Gabrieli, Department of Psychology, Stanford Univer- sity, Stanford, California 94305. Electronic mail may be sent to gabrieli@psych.stanford.edu. 479