Masked Priming Paradigm Research Articles

Does affective processing require awareness? On the use of the Perceptual Awareness Scale in response priming research.

Masked priming paradigms are frequently used to shine light on the processes of nonconscious cognition. Introducing a new method to this field, Lähteenmäki et al. (2015) claimed that affective priming requires awareness. Specifically, they administered a subjective rating task after the priming task in each trial to directly assess awareness of the prime. Their main result was a lack of priming for subjectively unaware primes. In four experiments, we compared their method with the traditional paradigm, that is, a single-task priming phase followed by a direct test of prime recognition. We used faces with anger versus sadness expressions as primes and targets; emotion categorization was the task. In contrast to Lähteenmäki et al., primes and targets were drawn from different sets, such that priming effects can be unequivocally attributed to the processing of evaluative features. In Experiments 1a, b, we followed their approach of using different prime durations to produce variance in awareness ratings. With a duration of 40 ms, significant priming effects for subjectively unaware primes were found. This duration was also associated with priming effects in the traditional paradigm with near-zero objective prime categorization, suggesting that priming does not require awareness. In Experiment 2a, employing a constant 40-ms duration, we replicated the traditional effect. However, the parallel Experiment 2b with subjective awareness ratings produced a null result at a sharply increased response time level. We conclude that the claim that affective processing requires awareness is not justified. Subjective trial-by-trial visibility ratings can severely alter processing strategies in response priming paradigms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Language in people with cervical dystonia: Evidence of grammatical and specific semantic deficits

BackgroundAlthough historically considered a motor disorder, cervical dystonia (CD) may present with subtle cognitive impairments. Basal ganglia dysfunction in other neurological conditions can lead to language impairments. Language in people with CD (pwCD) remains unexplored. ObjectivesThe study aimed to explore phonological, grammatical, and semantic language abilities in pwCD compared to healthy controls. Methods19 pwCD and 20 control participants completed the Object and Colour subtests of the Rapid Automized Naming Task (RAN), the Test for Reception of Grammar-2 (TROG-2), and a lexical decision task with a masked priming paradigm that compared reaction times to words varying according to two factors-hand relatedness (hand-related, non-hand-related) and word category (verb, noun). ResultsCompared to controls, pwCD were less accurate at grammatical comprehension on the TROG-2 (p < 0.05, n2 = 0.15). There were no significant differences between pwCD and controls in phonological retrieval, as measured by the RAN. PwCD demonstrated an overall reduced priming effect for all words, however, there is some evidence in our data that this may be more pronounced for hand-related words. ConclusionLanguage deficits should be considered an area of future research in pwCD. These findings support the role of the motor system in language.

High Neural Efficiency in Unconscious Perceptual Processing among Table Tennis Athletes: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Neural efficiency refers to the brain's ability to function with reduced resource expenditure while maintaining high performance levels. Previous research has demonstrated that table tennis athletes have greater neural efficiency at the conscious level. However, it is unknown whether they exhibit greater neural efficiency at the unconscious level. Therefore, this study aims to investigate unconscious perceptual processing and neural efficiency in elite table tennis athletes through tasks involving the judgment of spin serves. Fifty healthy, right-handed individuals participated in this study, including 25 elite table tennis athletes and 25 control participants without professional training experience. To evaluate the unconscious perceptual characteristics of both groups, we used a combination of masked priming paradigm and event-related potential techniques. The behavioral results reveal that, compared to the control group, the table tennis athletes displayed reduced reaction times (p < 0.001) and increased priming effects (p < 0.001) under unconscious conditions. The electrophysiological findings indicated that both groups elicited N1, N2, and P2 components. Notably, compared to the control group, the table tennis athletes exhibited significantly lower amplitude responses at the occipital lobe electrodes PO3, POz, PO4, O1, Oz, and O2 (p < 0.001). These results further support the neural efficiency hypothesis, indicating that prolonged professional training enhances athletes' capacities for specialized unconscious cognitive processing.

The Semantic Integration of Multiple Unconscious Stimuli in Creative Problem‐Solving

ABSTRACTThe process of creative problem‐solving (CPS) commonly demands that individuals consciously or unconsciously integrate creative ideas from a vast array of diverse information. Using a masked priming paradigm and the Chinese remote associates test (RAT), this study provides innovative behavioral evidence for the integration of multiple unconscious stimuli during CPS. In Experiment 1, three masked Chinese characters were simultaneously presented in the RAT, the first and third characters could be combined to form an answer. Two Chinese two‐character words were presented in parallel, each containing the answer in Experiment 2, and required the complete word information to be split and subsequently re‐integrated in a more complex manner than in Experiment 1. Interestingly, in both the experiments, multiple unconsciously processed stimuli generated a priming effect on creative performance. Specifically, a positive priming effect was observed in response to the difficult RATs, whereas a negative priming effect was observed in response to the easy RATs. Overall, our study verified that semantic integration between different unconsciously perceived stimuli can occur, which provides insights into the mechanisms underlying unconscious priming effects and contributes to a better understanding of how creative cognitive processing is influenced by multiple types of unconscious information.

Effects of Subjective Type Frequency and Phonetic Structure on L2 Morphological Processing: A Constructional Perspective

Little research has been conducted to investigate the effects of subjective type frequency and phonetic structure on morphological processing. From the perspective of construction, this study carried out two experiments to examine whether these two factors have impacts on the processing of derivatives by Chinese EFL learners. In Experiment 1, the masked priming paradigm produced facilitation effect for the prefixed words rather than the suffixed ones. However, participants with higher subjective type frequency of the target words did not differ significantly from their counterparts in response times (RTs). In Experiment 2, words whose phonetic structure is consistent with the morphological structure took significantly longer RTs than the inconsistent group and the monomorphemic words in the unprimed lexical decision task. These findings demonstrated that subjective type frequency may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the generalization of morphological constructions, while phonetic structure can affect the perceptual salience of affix, thus playing an important part in morphological decomposition.

An ERP Study on Affective Priming of Second Language: The Emotion Word Type Effect in Unmasked and Masked Priming Paradigms

An ERP Study on Affective Priming of Second Language: The Emotion Word Type Effect in Unmasked and Masked Priming Paradigms

Automatic phonological access among bilinguals with cross-script languages.

This study investigated the hypothesis of nonselective access to phonological representations in an integrated lexicon across logographic and alphabetic writing systems among Chinese L1 (first language)-English L2 (second language) bilinguals. We employed three experiments to test this hypothesis, including a lexical decision task (LDT) and a word naming task in Experiments 1 and 2 using the masked priming paradigm, and a self-paced sentence reading task in Experiment 3. Results from the LDT and the word naming task showed a significant homophone priming effect from L1 to L2, but not from L2 to L1. In the sentence reading task, we compared processing time between homophone error words and control words in the critical and spill-over regions. A slower processing effect in the homophone condition was observed in the spill-over region. Overall, these findings suggest that phonological priming occurs across a logographic and an alphabetic script in different tasks, whether reading isolated words or sentences. Bilingual reading involves an integrated bilingual lexicon that is independent of script similarity.

Event-related potential correlates of implicit processing of own- and other-race faces in children

Human adults typically experience difficulties in recognizing and discriminating individual faces belonging to racial groups other than their own. The origin of this “other-race” effect is set in infancy, but the understanding of its developmental course is fragmented. We aimed to access the mechanisms of the other-race effect in childhood by unraveling the neural time course of own- and other-race face processing during a masked priming paradigm. White 6- and 7-year-old children (N = 19) categorized fully visible Asian (other-race) or White (own-race) target faces according to gender. Target faces were preceded by masked same-identity or different-identity prime faces, matching the target for race and gender. We showed an early priming effect on the N100 component, with larger amplitude to different-face pairs than to same-face pairs, and a later race effect on the N200 component, with larger amplitude to own-race face pairs than to other-race face pairs. Critically, race did not interact with priming at any processing stage (P100, N100, P200, N200, or P300). Our results suggest that race could have a temporally limited impact on face processing and that the implicit and unconscious identity processing of own- and other-race faces could be similar in 6- and 7-year-olds, depicting an immature other-race effect during childhood.

The Unconscious Tug-of-War: Exploring the Effect of Stimulus Selection Bias on Creative Problem Solving with Multiple Unconscious Stimuli.

This study innovatively investigated the potential selection bias involved in processing multiple subliminal stimuli during creative problem-solving (CPS). It addresses the existing gap in specialized research on how the handling of multiple unconscious stimuli influences higher-order cognitive processes, particularly creativity. The study utilized a masked priming paradigm and a remote association task (RAT). Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 presented two stimuli simultaneously, with one being the correct answer, to examine whether there was a bias in the location of subliminal stimuli. In Experiment 2, two stimuli were presented sequentially, with one serving as the answer, to investigate whether there was a temporal bias in unconscious processing. Our findings revealed that when solving easy RATs, subliminal stimuli presented on the left side had a negative priming effect compared to the right side. The results revealed that unconscious processing of subliminal stimuli enhanced performance on difficult CPS. Additionally, a temporal bias was observed, with more recent subliminal stimuli having a stronger effect than earlier stimuli. Unconscious processing can improve CPS, especially for difficult tasks, and there is a bias towards processing stimuli on the left and more recently presented stimuli. These findings contribute to our understanding of unconscious processing, particularly the processing of multiple subliminal stimuli in CPS, and provide insights into the biases that exist in unconscious processing.

Does unconscious processing benefit creative problem-solving, especially when people have been misdirected?

The incubation paradigm has demonstrated the importance of unconscious processing in creative problem-solving, but it cannot specifically control the unconscious content.As there is limited research using the masked prime paradigm to explore the effects of unconscious processing on creative problem-solving, this study selected the alternative-uses task and innovatively adopted the masked priming paradigm and the incubation paradigms. In Experiment 1, we subliminally presented typical or novel examples, and the results showed that novel examples led to better creative performance, demonstrating that unconscious stimuli can influence divergent thinking. In Experiment 2, we contrasted the effects of two unconscious states triggered by the incubation and masked prime paradigms on creative tasks. Previous research suggested that incubation often occurs when the mind becomes stuck or is misdirected during problem-solving, indicating the role of fixation in this process. To control for the fixation variable, we employed a conscious prime. Experiment 2 revealed the fixation effects, significant positive incubation effects, and positive priming effects. Interestingly, the interruption group with novel conscious examples and a novel unconscious prime produced the highest originality and flexibility of divergent item generation. Incubation also diminished the influence of fixation examples. In brief, both forms of unconscious processing are beneficial to creative problem-solving after going through an incubation period and being given positive subliminal stimuli.

Does linear position matter for morphological processing? Evidence from a Tagalog masked priming experiment

ABSTRACT This study investigated morphological decomposition of Tagalog infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words using the masked priming paradigm. We directly compared morphological priming of <in> infixed, ni- prefixed and -in suffixed words to examine whether infixes are processed similarly to other affixes during early and automatic decomposition. We found significant priming effects for infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words, but no semantic or orthographic similarity priming. Magnitudes of priming effects for infixed and prefixed words were not significantly different, suggesting that decomposition of infixed words was not more costly for Tagalog speakers, contrary to phonological readjustment-based accounts of infixation. This is the first psycholinguistic experiment showing that infixed words are decomposed into morphological units during visual word recognition. We provide evidence that the imperfect edge-alignment of the stem within infixed words does not hamper the early morphological decomposition mechanisms, suggesting that edge-alignment might not be critical to trigger activation of morphological units.

Constituent processing in compound and pseudocompound words.

Theories of multimorphemic word recognition generally posit that constituent representations are involved in accessing the whole multimorphemic word. Gagné et al. (2018) found that pseudoconstituents and constituents become available when processing pseudocompound and compound masked primes (e.g., sea is activated in season and seabird). Across four experiments, we examine whether readers access the semantic information of such pseudoconstituents and constituents. Experiments 1 and 2 show that masked pseudocompound and compound primes do not influence lexical decision responses to semantic associates of their pseudoconstituents or constituents (e.g., seabird and season do not influence processing of ocean, an associate of sea). Experiments 3 and 4 show that an associate of the first constituent does not influence processing of the pseudocompound but does facilitate processing of the compound (e.g., ocean facilitates processing of seabird but not of season). While compounds have been found to be sensitive to the activation of their constituents via semantic priming (e.g., El-Bialy et al., 2013; Sandra, 1990), our findings suggest that primarily morphological, rather than semantic, activation of the constituents occurs in a masked priming paradigm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Zero-derived forms in the mental lexicon: Experimental evidence from Italian

Abstract Our paper investigates how zero-affixed verbal forms (specifically, denominal and deadjectival verbs) are processed by native speakers of Italian during visual word recognition. More specifically, we verify whether, and possibly to what extent, the processing of such forms differs from or resembles the processing of verbs resulting from two other productive word formation schemas in Italian, i. e., suffixation and parasynthesis. The interest of such a comparison lies in the fact that the three considered schemas behave similarly from a functional point of view, i. e.: i) they all change the category of the base, ii) they select the same base category (nouns and adjectives), and iii) they show similar semantic characteristics. However, this shared function is realized by means of different formal exponents (both overt and covert) which might imply different degrees of complexity. Crucially, suffixation and parasynthesis display an overt derivational marking, while zero-affixation obviously does not. On such premises, to verify whether the strength of connections between morphologically complex words and their bases is affected by the nature of the transcategorization marking (overt v s vs covert) or whether other factors play a more determining role, we conducted a psycholinguistic experiment involving a lexical decision task combined with the masked priming paradigm, which allows focusing on such relations in the mental lexicon. Results indicate that the processing of zero-affixed verbs resembles that of suffixed but differs from that of parasynthetic forms. We interpret such results discussing the possibility that the perception of a morphological relationship might depend less on the overtness of the marking, and more on the overall derivational complexity of the morphological process.

Word Structure Tunes Electrophysiological and Hemodynamic Responses in the Frontal Cortex

To date, it is still unclear how word structure might impact lexical processing in the brain for languages with an impoverished system of grammatical morphology such as Chinese. In this study, concurrent electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings were performed to inspect the temporal and spatial brain activities that are related to Chinese word structure (compound vs. derivation vs. non-morphological) effects. A masked priming paradigm was utilized on three lexical conditions (compound constitute priming, derivation constitute priming, and non-morphological priming) to tap Chinese native speakers' structural sensitivity to differing word structures. The compound vs. derivation structure effect was revealed by the behavioral data as well as the temporal and spatial brain activation patterns. In the masked priming task, Chinese derivations exhibited significantly enhanced brain activation in the frontal cortex and involved broader brain networks as compared with lexicalized compounds. The results were interpreted by the differing connection patterns between constitute morphemes within a given word structure from a spreading activation perspective. More importantly, we demonstrated that the Chinese word structure effect showed a distinct brain activation pattern from that of the dual-route mechanism in alphabetic languages. Therefore, this work paved a new avenue for comprehensively understanding the underlying cognitive neural mechanisms associated with Chinese derivations and coordinate compounds.

Subliminal speech priming of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from the Auditory Masked Priming Paradigm

Subliminal speech priming of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from the Auditory Masked Priming Paradigm

Contribution of semantic context to bilingual processing

Aims: This paper seeks to determine the degree to which bilinguals and monolinguals use the semantic information available to them to activate semantically related lexical associates and facilitate processing. Design: We conduct a visual word masked priming task with 300 pairs of words that differed in forward strength of association in English-dominant early-acquiring and late bilinguals and monolinguals. We measured the reaction time for participants who completed a semantic judgment. Data and Analysis: Reaction times from 34 college-aged bilinguals and 28 monolinguals were analyzed with a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs). The coefficient of variation (CV), a measure of efficiency, was calculated and used to compare speaker groups. Conclusions: Results indicated bilinguals were generally slower than monolinguals and did not display a benefit of additional semantic context on reaction time speed. The increase of semantic information in highly associated word pairs compared to unassociated word pairs did not increase reaction time in bilinguals to the same degree as it did in monolinguals. Comparing CV values indicate that the speaker groups were processing semantic information with approximately equal efficiency, although both groups were processing at different speeds. Originality: This study expands on previous research exploring the effect of semantic relations across three word strengths conditions and using visual pairs in a masked priming paradigm using predominantly English-dominant bilinguals. Significance: The findings indicate that even early-acquiring bilinguals may not be using meaning-related information to activate semantic associates in the same way as monolinguals. Such differences with word-level processing and activation may contribute to bilinguals’ differences and delays in sentence processing tasks.

Electrophysiological correlates of masked orthographic and phonological priming in Chinese–English bilinguals

Extensive behavioral and electrophysiological evidence has demonstrated that native translations are automatically activated when bilinguals read non-native words. The present study investigated the impact of cross-language orthography and phonology on Chinese–English bilingual lexicons with a masked priming paradigm. The masked primes and targets were either translation equivalents (TE), orthographically related through translation (OR), phonologically related through translation (PR), or unrelated control (UC). Participants retained the targets in memory and decided whether the delayed catch words matched the targets. ERP data showed significant masked translation priming effects, as reflected by decreased ERP amplitudes in the TE condition in the 300–600 ms time window from frontal to parietal electrode clusters. Importantly, compared with the UC condition, the PR rather than OR condition elicited less negative ERP waveforms in the 300–500 ms time window with a frontal distribution. Taken together, these temporal and spatial dynamics suggested an automatic cross-language co-activation at the phonological and semantic levels for different-script bilinguals.

Enhancing free choice masked priming via switch trials during repeated practice.

The masked priming paradigm has been extensively used to investigate the indirect impacts of unconscious stimuli on conscious behaviors, and the congruency effect of priming on free choices has gained increasing attention. Free choices allow participants to voluntarily choose a response from multiple options during each trial. While repeated practice is known to increase priming effects in subliminal visual tasks, whether practice increases the priming effect of free choices in the masked priming paradigm is unclear. And it is also not clear how the proportions of free choice and forced choice trials in one block will affect the free choice masked priming effect. The present study applied repeated practice in the masked priming paradigm and found that after training, the participants were more likely to be influenced by masked primes during free choice, but this training process did not alter the visibility of masked stimuli. In addition, this study revealed that when the proportions of free choice and forced choice trials were equal during the training stage, this enhanced effect by practice was the strongest. These results indicated that practice could enhance masked stimulus processing in free-choice, and that the learning effect may mainly be derived from the early selection and integrated processing of masked stimuli.

Does adding an accent mark hinder lexical access? Evidence from Spanish

Recent research has shown that omitting the accent mark in a Spanish word, which is a language in which these diacritics only indicate lexical stress, does not cause a delay in lexical access (e.g., cárcel [prison] ≈ carcel; cárcel-CÁRCEL ≈ carcel-CÁRCEL). This pattern has been interpreted as accented and nonaccented vowels sharing the abstract letter representations in Spanish. However, adding an accent mark to a nonaccented Spanish word appears to produce a reading cost in masked priming paradigms (e.g., féliz-FELIZ [happy] > feliz-FELIZ). We examined whether adding an accent mark to a non accented Spanish word slows down lexical access in two semantic categorization experiments to solve this puzzle. We added an accent mark either on the stressed syllable (Experiment 1, e.g., cébra for the word cebra [zebra]) or an unstressed syllable (Experiment 2, e.g., cebrá). While effect sizes were small in magnitude, adding an accent mark produced a cost relative to the intact words, especially when the accent mark was added on an unstressed syllable (cebrá > cebra). These findings favor the view that letter identity and (to a lesser extent) accent mark information are encoded during word recognition in Spanish. We also examined the practical implications of these results.

A prime-masked ERP investigation on phonology in visual word processing among bilingual speakers of alphasyllabic and alphabetic orthographies

In this study, we experimentally manipulated the phonology of the cross-script prime-target dyads in an ERP-coupled masked priming paradigm to explore the role phonology plays in visual word processing. The written characters of certain bilingual dyads seldom show any visual/orthographic similarity, yet have the same phonological representation. While the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model relies on the orthographic similarity between the languages in a bilingual dyad, its revised version (BIA + model) additionally banks on the phonological (and semantic) similarity between the words in such dyads. Thus, there exists the need to investigate the role of phonological (and semantic) similarity between the words of a bilingual dyad, especially in the absence of orthographic similarity. Borrowed words from one language to another provide a suitable avenue to explore this question. Cross-orthographic (or cross-script) bilingual participants of this study performed the semantic judgment of visually presented words in a masked priming paradigm in each of their languages while we simultaneously collected the event-related potentials (ERPs). The primes were either translations (different phonology & orthography: P–O–; phonologically incongruent) or transliterations (same phonology & different orthography: P + O–; phonologically congruent) of the target. Overall, the results showed no difference between the two prime conditions. We discuss our findings in light of the BIA and BIA + models of bilingual visual word processing and discuss the relevance of the former model in orthographically distinct bilingual language dyads.