Choosing category or complementary relations: prior tendencies modulate instructional effects.
Concepts in semantic memory are associated with other categorically (e.g., dog-horse) and complementarily (e.g., dog-bone) related concepts. Although complementary relations produce more robust priming (e.g., Lupker, 1984), categorical responding is more common in preference tasks where participants choose directly between categorical and complementary relations (e.g., Smiley & Brown, 1979). Three experiments examined the effects of instructions and individual differences on adult preferences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that category preferences were infrequent, and that "most similar" instructions produced modestly more category responses than "goes together" instructions. In Experiments 2 and 3, emphasizing key words enhanced the instructional effect, and "similar" instructions produced especially large increases in category preferences for participants predisposed to categorical relationships. These preference experiments demonstrate that complementary advantages are similar to those for priming, and that instructions and prior tendencies can have subtle influences on semantic memory.