Abstract
The discussion about relationship between prime and target has contributed to the mechanism of priming effect and object recognition. Nevertheless, the role of relationship between mask and target in those cognitive processes remains unquestioned. In the present study, we aim to investigate how mask-target hierarchical relationship may affect word priming and familiarity, by using the masked repetition paradigm and manipulating three hierarchical relationship between mask and target. It is hypothesized that a closer hierarchical relationship between mask and target is associated with a higher mask target similarity, and thereby it leads to a worse recognition performance. Our behavioral results do not support this hypothesis by showing no effect of mask target hierarchical relationship on response time (RT) and accuracy. Event-related potentials (ERPs) indicated that highly similar mask-target triggered (i.e., the subordinate-subordinate-subordinate trials) larger N1 amplitudes, suggesting that it requires more cognitive resource to discriminate the stimuli. In addition, trials with highly similar mask-target hierarchical relationship induced smaller P2 (150–250 ms) and larger mid-frontal FN400 amplitudes than do trials with low mask-target similarity (i.e., the subordinate-basic-subordinate and the subordinate-superordinate-subordinate trials). Our results suggested that the similarity between mask and target may impede conceptual fluency to reduce word priming and familiarity effect.
Highlights
In the majority of investigations of word recognition processes, masked priming has become a key tool to study word priming and memory related familiarity
The masking effect could be interpreted as the mask and target are ‘‘fused’’ and are treated as one stimulus, which result in recognition impairment (Turvey, 1973)
The present study aimed to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of how different concept level masks to affect processing fluency and subsequent recognition by recording event-related potential (ERP) responses
Summary
In the majority of investigations of word recognition processes, masked priming has become a key tool to study word priming and memory related familiarity. Numerous studies have shown that more accurate and faster behavioral responses to target words, when target words are preceded by semantically related prime (e.g., cat-dog) or by identity word (e.g., dog-dog) relative to when they are preceded by semantically unrelated prime (hand-dog). This priming and familiarity effect are considered to be products of semantic relationships or associative links between primes and targets (Neely, 1991; Dehaene et al, 1998; Kouider and Dehaene, 2007; Ortells et al, 2016). The majority works have been focused on exploring the relationship between prime and target
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