Repetition Priming Effects Research Articles

Cross-language repetition priming effect of semantic access for trilinguals

Cross-language repetition priming effect of semantic access for trilinguals

Learning by Stimulation: Investigating the Effect of tDCS on Repetition Priming and Incidental Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition in Healthy Young Adults.

Learning by Stimulation: Investigating the Effect of tDCS on Repetition Priming and Incidental Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition in Healthy Young Adults.

Trans-saccadic repetition priming: ERPs reveal on-line integration of information across words

We used a trans-saccadic priming paradigm combined with ERP recordings to track the time-course of integration of information across a prime word briefly presented at fixation and a subsequent target word presented 4 degrees to the right of fixation. Trans-saccadic repetition priming effects (Experiments 1 and 2) were compared with priming effects obtained with centrally located targets (Experiment 3). In Experiment 2, target stimuli were preceded by a 100ms forward mask at the target location, hence allowing an attention shift to the target location prior to target onset. Compared with centrally located targets, repetition priming effects were found to onset later in Experiment 2 and even later in Experiment 1, and the growth of priming effects was slower in both Experiments 1 and 2 compared with Experiment 3. The results demonstrate integration of information across spatially distinct primes and targets, with the time-course of trans-saccadic priming being determined by the speed with which attention can be allocated to peripheral targets plus the quality of information available in peripheral vision prior to fixation of target stimuli.

The effect of repetition priming on spatial memory during backtracking in a novel environment.

During wayfinding in a novel environment, we encounter many new places. Some of those places are encoded by our spatial memory. But how does the human brain "decides" which locations are more important than others, and how do backtracking and repetition priming enhances memorization of these scenes? In this work, we explore how backtracking improves encoding of encountered locations. We also check whether repetition priming helps with further memory enhancement. We recruited 20 adults. Each participant was guided through an unfamiliar indoor environment. The participants were instructed to remember the path, as they would need to backtrack by themselves. Two groups were defined: the first group performed a spatial memory test at the goal destination and after backtracking; the second group performed the test only after backtracking. The mean spatial memory scores of the first group improved significantly after backtracking: from 49.8 to 60.8%. The score of the second group was 62%. No difference was found in performance between the first group and the second group. Backtracking alone significantly improves spatial memory of visited places. Surprisingly, repetition priming does not further enhance memorization of these places. This result may suggest that spatial reasoning causes significant cognitive load that thwarts further improvement of spatial memory of locations.

The Effects of Visual Perceptual Repetition Priming of Road Signs on Driving Performance in Young and Old Adults

Abstract Date Presented 4/17/2015 The results of the study show that priming in either word or symbol format led to an increased recognition of road signs in both younger and older adult drivers.

Electrophysiology of facilitation priming in obsessive–compulsive and panic disorders

ObjectiveRepeated experience with stimuli often primes faster, more efficient neuronal and behavioural responses. Exaggerated repetition priming effects have previously been reported in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), however little is known of their underlying neurobiology or disorder-specificity, hence we investigated these factors. MethodsWe examined event-related potentials (ERPs) and behaviour while participants with OCD, panic disorder and healthy controls (20 per group) performed a Go/NoGo task which manipulated target repetition sequences. ResultsBoth clinical groups showed stronger reaction time (RT) priming than HCs, which in OCD was greater in a checking, than washing, subgroup. Both clinical groups had similar RT deficits and ERP anomalies across several components, which correlated with psychopathology and RT priming. In OCD alone, N1 latency tended to increase to repeated stimuli, correlated with O–C symptoms, whereas it decreased in other groups. OCD-checkers had smaller target P2 amplitude than all other groups. ConclusionsEnhanced neural priming is not unique to OCD and may contribute to salient sensory-cognitive experiences in anxiety generally. These effects are related to symptom severity and occur to neutral stimuli and in the context of overall RT impairment, suggesting they may be clinically relevant and pervasive. The results indicate overlapping information-processing and neurobiological factors across disorders, with indications of OCD-specific trends and subgroup differences. SignificanceThis first electrophysiological investigation of OCD priming in OCD to include anxious controls and OCD subgroups allows for differentiation between overlapping and OCD-specific phenomena, to advance neurobiological models of OCD.

The relationship between morphological awareness and morphological decomposition among English language learners

Morphological awareness facilitates many reading processes. For this reason, L1 and L2 learners of English are often directly taught to use their knowledge of English morphology as a useful reading strategy for determining parts of speech and meaning of novel words. Over time, use of morphological awareness skills while reading develops into an automatic process for L1 readers called morphological decomposition. While the practice of explicitly teaching morphological awareness skills is prevalent in ESL classes, more research is needed to establish what is known about gains in L2 morphological awareness, and its relationship to the development of automatic morphological decomposition processes in English language learners. The present study seeks to shed light on the nature of this relationship across growth in L2 proficiency. Two experimental measures were used: a masked priming paradigm with a lexical decision task to explore priming evidence for morphological decomposition and a paper and pencil test of morphological awareness which required subjects to derive the base of a morphologically complex word. These tasks were administered to L1 (N = 43) and L2 groups (intermediate N = 16, advanced N = 16) of university-aged subjects. Results indicated that all subjects show repetition priming effects. However, despite a significant gain in explicit knowledge of English morphology across proficiency levels, L2 learners don’t develop an ability to morphologically decompose words in the unconscious, automatic way that native English speakers do, as evidenced by a lack of morphological priming. Implications for L2 pedagogy and L2 word storage in the mental lexicon are discussed.

Preserved cumulative semantic interference despite amnesia

Preserved cumulative semantic interference despite amnesia

Thresholds of visibility for masked lexical, non-lexical, and non-linguistic items in aphasia

Thresholds of visibility for masked lexical, non-lexical, and non-linguistic items in aphasia

The cumulative semantic interference effect in normal and pathological ageing

People affected by mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a precursor of Alzheimer’s Disease, present with impairments in picture naming, a lexical/semantic task which rests on the activation of perceptual, semantic, and phonological representations. The poor performance of MCI individuals in picture naming has been accounted for in terms of deficits of either the perceptual, semantic, or phonological stages. To disentangle the source of this deficit we compared the cumulative semantic interference effect (Howard et al., 2006. Cognition. 100, 464–482.) and the repetition priming effect of a group of people with MCI to that of a group of healthy elderly participants and with a group of healthy young participants. The cumulative semantic interference effect defines a linear increase in the picture naming reaction times which is function of the already named pictures belonging to the same semantic category to which the named picture belongs. The repetition priming effect refers to an increase in performance for repeated items compared to unrepeated items. Results showed that whereas the cumulative semantic interference effect was present in the healthy elderly and young samples, it was absent in the MCI sample; instead, all groups showed comparable repetition priming effects. This pattern of results suggests that the impairment in picture naming exhibited by MCI individuals is due to an inefficient semantic access.

Talker variability in spoken word recognition: Evidence from repetition priming

The effect of talker variability on the processing of spoken words is investigated using short-term repetition priming experiments. Prime-target pairs, either repeated (e.g., queen-queen) or unrelated (e.g., bell-queen), were produced by the same or different male speakers. Two interstimulus intervals (ISI, 50 and 250 ms) were used to explore the time course of repetition priming and voice specificity effects. The auditory stimuli were presented to 40 listeners, who completed a lexical decision task followed by a talker voice discrimination task. Results from the lexical decision task showed that the magnitude of priming was attenuated in the different-talker condition, indicating a talker variability effect on spoken word recognition. In contrast, the talker variability effect on priming did not differ between the two ISIs. Talker voice discrimination was faster and more accurate for nonword targets, but not for word targets, indicating a lexical status effect on voice discrimination. Taken together, these results suggest that talker variability affects recognition of spoken words, and that the effect cannot be simply attributed to non-lexical voice discrimination.

An ERP investigation of dichotic repetition priming with temporally overlapping stimuli.

In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of prime-target repetition using a dichotic priming paradigm. Participants monitored a stream of target words in the right, attended ear for occasional animal names, and ERPs were recorded to nonanimal words that were either unrelated to or a repetition of prime words presented to the left ear. The prime words were spoken in a different voice and had a lower intensity than did the target words, and the prime word onset occurred 50 ms before target word onset. Repetition-priming effects were observed in the ERPs starting around 150 ms post-target-onset and continued to influence processing for the duration of the target stimuli. These priming effects provide further evidence in favor of parallel processing of overlapping dichotic stimuli, at least up to the level of some form of sublexical phonological representation, a likely locus for the integration of the two sources of information.

Inferring the direction of implied motion depends on visual awareness

Visual awareness of an event, object, or scene is, by essence, an integrated experience, whereby different visual features composing an object (e.g., orientation, color, shape) appear as an unified percept and are processed as a whole. Here, we tested in human observers whether perceptual integration of static motion cues depends on awareness by measuring the capacity to infer the direction of motion implied by a static visible or invisible image under continuous flash suppression. Using measures of directional adaptation, we found that visible but not invisible implied motion adaptors biased the perception of real motion probes. In a control experiment, we found that invisible adaptors implying motion primed the perception of subsequent probes when they were identical (i.e., repetition priming), but not when they only shared the same direction (i.e., direction priming). Furthermore, using a model of visual processing, we argue that repetition priming effects are likely to arise as early as in the primary visual cortex. We conclude that although invisible images implying motion undergo some form of nonconscious processing, visual awareness is necessary to make inferences about motion direction.

You Better Stop! Binding “Stop” Tags to Irrelevant Stimulus Features

We investigated whether the basic process of integrating stimuli (and their features) with simultaneously executed responses transfers to situations in which one does not respond to a stimulus. In three experiments, a stop-signal task was combined with a sequential priming paradigm to test whether irrelevant stimulus features become associated with a "stop" tag. Stopping a simple response during the prime trial delayed responding and facilitated stopping in the probe if the same irrelevant stimulus feature was repeated in the probe. These repetition priming effects were independent of the relation between the to-be-executed (or to-be-stopped) responses in the prime and probe, indicating that "stop" tags are global ("stop all responses!") rather than being response-related (e.g., "stop left response!").

Repetition-priming effect: a cognitive task for the definition of a clinical assessment

This research aims to study how semantic priming words can influence behavioral measures (RTs, accuracy), to develop an experimental paradigm to differentiate visual neglect and hemianopia. 69 experimental subjects were involved in four experiments. In each experiment target words were preceded by word primes semantically related, neutral or unrelated to the target. The four experiments differed in terms of: number of prime, prime duration and distance between pc monitor and subject. In general, related primes should improve facilitatory effect in target recognition more than unrelated primes, reducing RTs and increasing response accuracy. After repeated ANOVA analysis applied to each experiment and paired comparisons, it is possible to point out that single related primes, shown for 150 ms, greatly improve response behavior in terms of RTs reduction. For future applications to the clinical field, we assume that neglect patients should be facilitated in these specific experimental conditions, due to implicit contralesional prime processing. On the contrary, hemianopics should nowise be facilitated, due to visual field deficit.

Access to talker-specific representations is dependent on word frequency

Determining the precise circumstances under which nonlinguistic information such as talker identity influences spoken-word recognition is critical for models that postulate both abstract and detailed representations. In this study, we used the long-term repetition priming paradigm and manipulated both talker identity and word frequency. The results showed that change in the talker identity diminishes the magnitude of the repetition priming effect when words are of low frequency but not when they are of high frequency. Our results support the time-course hypothesis which posits that talker-specificity effects take time to develop, and thus are more likely to emerge when lexical identification requires time to be accomplished.

Hearing words helps seeing words: A cross-modal word repetition effect

Watching a speaker say words benefits subsequent auditory recognition of the same words. In this study, we tested whether hearing words also facilitates subsequent phonological processing from visual speech, and if so, whether speaker repetition influences the magnitude of this word repetition priming. We used long-term cross-modal repetition priming as a means to investigate the underlying lexical representations involved in listening to and seeing speech. In Experiment 1, listeners identified auditory-only words during exposure and visual-only words at test. Words at test were repeated or new and produced by the exposure speaker or a novel speaker. Results showed a significant effect of cross-modal word repetition priming but this was unaffected by speaker changes. Experiment 2 added an explicit recognition task at test. Listeners’ lipreading performance was again improved by prior exposure to auditory words. Explicit recognition memory was poor, and neither word repetition nor speaker repetition improved it. This suggests that cross-modal repetition priming is neither mediated by explicit memory nor improved by speaker information. Our results suggest that phonological representations in the lexicon are shared across auditory and visual processing, and that speaker information is not transferred across modalities at the lexical level.

Masked priming and ERPs dissociate maturation of orthographic and semantic components of visual word recognition in children

This study examined the time-course of reading single words in children and adults using masked repetition priming and the recording of event-related potentials. The N250 and N400 repetition priming effects were used to characterize form- and meaning-level processing, respectively. Children had larger amplitude N250 effects than adults for both shorter and longer duration primes. Children did not differ from adults on the N400 effect. The difference on the N250 suggests that automaticity for form processing is still maturing in children relative to adults, while the lack of differentiation on the N400 effect suggests that meaning processing is relatively mature by late childhood. The overall similarity in the children's repetition priming effects to adults' effects is in line with theories of reading acquisition, according to which children rapidly transition to an orthographic strategy for fast access to semantic information from print.

Alertness Modulates Conflict Adaptation and Feature Integration in an Opposite Way

Previous studies show that the congruency sequence effect can result from both the conflict adaptation effect (CAE) and feature integration effect which can be observed as the repetition priming effect (RPE) and feature overlap effect (FOE) depending on different experimental conditions. Evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests that a close correlation exists between the neural mechanisms of alertness-related modulations and the congruency sequence effect. However, little is known about whether and how alertness mediates the congruency sequence effect. In Experiment 1, the Attentional Networks Test (ANT) and a modified flanker task were used to evaluate whether the alertness of the attentional functions had a correlation with the CAE and RPE. In Experimental 2, the ANT and another modified flanker task were used to investigate whether alertness of the attentional functions correlate with the CAE and FOE. In Experiment 1, through the correlative analysis, we found a significant positive correlation between alertness and the CAE, and a negative correlation between the alertness and the RPE. Moreover, a significant negative correlation existed between CAE and RPE. In Experiment 2, we found a marginally significant negative correlation between the CAE and the RPE, but the correlation between alertness and FOE, CAE and FOE was not significant. These results suggest that alertness can modulate conflict adaptation and feature integration in an opposite way. Participants at the high alerting level group may tend to use the top-down cognitive processing strategy, whereas participants at the low alerting level group tend to use the bottom-up processing strategy.

Effects of phonological and semantic deficits on facilitative and inhibitory consequences of item repetition in spoken word comprehension

Repeating a word can have both facilitative and inhibitory effects on subsequent processing. The present study investigated these dynamics by examining the facilitative and inhibitory consequences of different kinds of item repetition in two individuals with aphasia and a group of neurologically intact control participants. The two individuals with aphasia were matched on overall aphasia severity, but had deficits at different levels of processing: one with a phonological deficit and spared semantic processing, the other with a semantic deficit and spared phonological processing. Participants completed a spoken word-to-picture matching task in which they had to pick which of four object images matched the spoken word. The trials were grouped into pairs such that exactly two objects from the first trial in a pair were present on screen during the second trial in the pair. When the second trial's target was the same as the first trial's target, compared to control participants, both participants with aphasia exhibited equally larger repetition priming effects. When the second trial's target was one of the new items, the participant with a phonological deficit exhibited a significantly more negative effect (i.e., second trial response slower than first trial response) than the control participants and the participant with a semantic deficit. Simulations of a computational model confirmed that this pattern of results could arise from (1) normal residual activation being functionally more significant when overall lexical processing is slower and (2) residual phonological activation of the previous trial's target having a particularly strong inhibitory effect specifically when phonological processing is impaired because the task was phonologically-driven (the spoken input specified the target). These results provide new insights into perseveration errors and lexical access deficits in aphasia.