Primes and flankers: Source confusions and discounting

Abstract

Visual identification of briefly presented target words is affected by the presence of nondiagnostic prime words that immediately precede the target, flanker words simultaneously presented adjacent to the target, and visual masks that immediately follow the target in the same location. Priming is duration dependent: In a forced choice target identification task, brief primes produce a strong preference to choose the primed alternative, whereas long primes have the opposite effect. The ROUSE model (Huber, Shiffrin, Lyle, & Ruys, Psychological Review 108:149-182, 2001) predicts this interaction by positing that prime features are confused with target features and that evidence regarding the prime features is discounted less for short primes and more for long primes, when both are compared with the optimal level. In the present study, we augmented the typical short-term priming experiment by adding flankers that appeared simultaneously with the target and remained for a short or long duration. In the experiment, we replicated previous priming effects and produced novel effects of flanker duration. ROUSE accounted for both the priming and flanker findings with the previously posited processes, but with different quantitative parameters for flankers: Relative to optimal levels of discounting, all flanker features were underdiscounted, but longer flankers were discounted more than short flankers.