Abstract
People can rapidly form arbitrary associations between stimuli and the responses they make in the presence of those stimuli. Such stimulus-response (S-R) bindings, when retrieved, affect the way that people respond to the same, or related, stimuli. Only recently, however, has the flexibility and ubiquity of these S-R bindings been appreciated, particularly in the context of priming paradigms. This is important for the many cognitive theories that appeal to evidence from priming. It is also important for the control of action generally. An S-R binding is more than a gradually learned association between a specific stimulus and a specific response; instead, it captures the full, context-dependent behavioral potential of a stimulus.
Highlights
Our daily lives involve interacting with a large number of stimuli
There are many theories relating to S–R bindings; we focus on one example pertinent to each of the three priming paradigms considered here (Box 1)
We have focused on reaction time (RT), incongruent S–R bindings may lead to increased error rates [4,60,67,68,69]
Summary
Our daily lives involve interacting with a large number of stimuli. Many of these stimuli occur once, but recur at different timescales. Evidence that the masked digit ‘3’ can prime a relative size judgment to a subsequent probe ‘4’, even if the 3 was not presented previously in the experiment [60], can be explained by a generic trigger of the sort ‘small numbers should produce a ‘‘no’’ response’ These S–R theories have proved helpful, each needs further development to explain the precise role of attention and awareness during encoding and retrieval of S–R bindings (see text) and their interactions with other component processes. In the case of repetition priming, for example, Horner and Henson [12] showed a reduction in priming when the response to a repeated stimulus switched from a vocal yes/no to a manual key press (relative to the congruent condition of a manual response to both prime and probe) This suggests that the specific motor action is encoded in the S–R binding. It has even been proposed that stimuli can be bound to attentional filters that have been previously applied to those stimuli [24]
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