Twenty-four closed-head-injured (CHI) and 24 control
participants studied two word lists under shallow (i.e.,
nonsemantic) and deep (i.e., semantic) encoding conditions.
They were then tested on free recall, perceptual priming
(i.e., perceptual partial word identification) and conceptual
priming (i.e., category production) tasks. Previous findings
have demonstrated that memory in CHI is characterized by
inefficient conceptual processing of information. It was
thus hypothesized that the CHI participants would perform
more poorly than the control participants on the explicit
and on the conceptual priming tasks. On these tasks the
CHI group was expected to benefit to a lesser degree from
prior deep encoding, as compared to controls. The groups
were not expected to significantly differ from each other
on the perceptual priming task. Prior deep encoding was
not expected to improve the perceptual priming performance
of either group. All findings were as predicted, with the
exception that a significant effect was not found between
groups for deep encoding in the conceptual priming task.
The results are discussed (1) in terms of their theoretical
contribution in further validating the dissociation between
perceptual and conceptual priming; and (2) in terms of
the contribution in differentiating between amnesic and
CHI patients. Conceptual priming is preserved in amnesics
but not in CHI patients. (JINS, 1997, 3,
327–336.)