In a study, people with memory problems were compared to people without such problems on a word learning task. When asked to recall a list of words they were exposed to, people in the amnesia group demonstrated much less recall than the comparison group. But when they were given the first three letters of the word, the amnesia group performed at least as well as the comparison group. This illustrates which of the following?

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First, I will restate the scenario and the options to ensure clarity about what is being evaluated. In this study, individuals with memory problems (amnesia) showed greatly reduced free recall for a list of words, compared to those without memory problems. However, when given the first three letters of each word, the amnesia group performed as well as or better than the comparison group. The question asks which cognitive process this pattern best illustrates.

Option 1: Semantic memory. Semantic memory refers to a person’s general world knowledge and meanings of words and concepts, independent of personal experience. The task here involves retrieving specific word lists or recognizing words based on partial cues, not accessing general knowledge about word meanings. Therefore, the observed pattern is not best explained by semantic memory, since semantic memory would influence knowledge content rather than cue-based partial word retrieval under amnesia.

Option 2: Priming. Priming is a form of implicit memory where exposure to a stimulus influences the response to a later stimulus, often without conscious awareness. A classic demonstration is that memory-impaired individuals can perform better on tasks when provided with cues that were present during encoding, such as partial word stems helping recognition or retrieval, even if free recall is poor. In this case, the amnesia group’s intact performance with first three letters indicates that they benefited from a cue-based facilitation that does not require intact explicit recall, consistent with priming.

Option 3: Procedural memory. Procedural memory concerns learning skills and actions (e.g., riding a bike, playing piano) that are often automatic and do not depend on conscious recall. The task described is a verbal memory task involving word lists and cues, not a motor or skill-based learning task, so procedural memory does not fit this pattern.

Option 4: Episodic memory. Episodic memory involves remembering specific events and experiences, including the context (what, where, when). Free recall of a word list is typically considered a test of episodic memory. The fact that amnesia impairs free recall aligns with episodic memory impairment; however, the preserved ability to use the first three letters as cues suggests that some memory processes (cue-based retrieval) are spared, which is more characteristic of priming rather than a deficit solely in episodic memory. The discrepancy between poor recall and cue-facilitated retrieval points away from episodic memory as the best explanation for the pattern.

In sum, the crucial distinction here is that the amnesic participants struggle with recall but can be helped by partial-word cues, revealing intact cue-based, automatic processing typical of priming, rather than a complete loss of all memory forms. The other options fail to capture this dissociation between recall difficulty and cue-facilitated performance, either because they misattribute the effect to explicit knowledge, motor skills, or to a broader episodic impairment without acknowledging the cue-driven facilitation observed.

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