Constraints on the Observation of Partial Match Costs: Implications for Transfer-Appropriate Processing Approaches to Immediate Priming Jason P. Leboe and Launa C. Leboe University of Manitoba Bruce Milliken McMaster University According to a transfer-appropriate processing framework, immediate priming costs arise from a match between a prime and probe event on 1 dimension and a difference between those 2 events on some other dimension (i.e., a partial match). In Experiment 1, the authors used a Stroop priming procedure to generate 6 variants of partial match, yet only 1 of these 6 conditions yielded a partial match cost. Experiment 2 demonstrates that, for some of these conditions, an underlying partial match cost was obscured by the contribution of an independent source of facilitation to performance. In Experiment 3, however, a partial match was observed to have produced an immediate priming cost only when the selective attention demands of the probe task were high. Overall, the results reveal a limitation in current applications of the transfer-appropriate processing framework to immediate priming phenomena. Keywords: repetition effects, transfer-appropriate processing, episodic retrieval, negative priming, Stroop interference The transfer-appropriate processing principle (Morris, Brans- ford, & Franks, 1977) has long been useful in explaining perfor- mance in remembering tasks (see also the encoding specificity principle; Tulving & Thompson, 1973). According to this princi- ple, success in remembering a previous experience depends on the degree of match between retrieval conditions and those present at the time of encoding (Morris et al., 1977; Roediger, Gallo, & Geraci, 2002; Tulving & Thompson, 1973; Whittlesea, 1997; Whittlesea & Price, 2001). Impressively, this same principle has been applied in a variety of nonremembering tasks, including categorization (Whittlesea, Brooks, & Westcott, 1994; Whittlesea & Dorken, 1993), reading (Kolers & Smythe, 1980), word identi- fication (Jacoby, 1983), and, of most interest here, short-term priming (Leboe, Mondor, & Leboe, 2006; Leboe, Whittlesea, & Milliken, 2005; Masson & Bodner, 2003; Neill & Mathis, 1998; Whittlesea & Jacoby, 1990; Wood & Milliken, 1998). This breadth of application of the transfer-appropriate processing principle il- lustrates the relevance of episodic memory far beyond the con- straints of tasks that measure explicit episodic remembering. The backdrop for the research reported in this article is more specifically the shift toward interpreting short-term priming effects in terms of episodic memory principles (Hommel, 1998; Mayr & Buchner, 2007; Neill, Valdes, Terry, & Gorfein, 1992; Neill & Mathis, 1998; Rothermund, Wentura, & de Houwer, 2005). In a nutshell, many short-term priming findings have been reported over the past 15 years or so that are difficult to explain by reference to short-lived activation and inhibition processes and that instead appear consistent with the transfer-appropriate processing principle. However, as useful as is the transfer-appropriate pro- cessing principle in explaining some patterns of performance, it falls short of explaining in any obvious way the full breadth of performance in quite a few short-term priming contexts. Rather than do away with this application of the transfer-appropriate process- ing principle altogether, we propose that what is needed is an under- standing of precisely when it applies, when it does not apply, and how it might apply in concert with other processes to codetermine short- term priming effects. Although a full treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of any one article, here we take a step toward this objective in one particular short-term priming context. Specifically, we apply a task analysis to some challenging Stroop priming results, with an eye toward evaluating how they might be accommodated within a transfer-appropriate processing framework. Transfer-Appropriate Processing and the Immediate Priming Method In a typical short-term priming procedure, an experimental trial consists of two events: a prime event followed by a probe event. To emphasize the very short time interval between prime and probe in the short-term priming studies of interest here (i.e., on the order of 2 s or less), we use the term immediate priming to describe this procedure. Whereas many studies over the years have shown that responses are particularly fast or accurate when probes are identical to immediately preceding primes (i.e., repetition prim- ing), increasing attention has been paid to the idea that immediate priming effects hinge on the processing overlap between prime and probe. In other words, relatedness of prime–probe pairs in and of Jason P. Leboe and Launa C. Leboe, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; and Bruce Milliken, Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This research was supported by Natural Science and Engineering Re- search Council of Canada Discovery Grants awarded to Jason P. Leboe and Bruce Milliken and by funding provided to Jason P. Leboe by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Manitoba Research & Innovations Fund. We are grateful to Bernard Hommel and three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also thank Ellen MacLellan, Adam Stewart, and Jady Wong for their assistance with data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jason P. Leboe, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3T 2N2. E-mail: leboej@cc.umanitoba.ca Journal of Experimental Psychology: © 2010 American Psychological Association Human Perception and Performance 2010, Vol. 36, No. 3, 634 – 648 0096-1523/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0016463 634