Robust Priming Effects Research Articles

The Effect of Feedback Schedule Manipulation on Speech Priming Patterns and Reaction Time

Speech priming tasks are frequently used to delineate stages in the speech process such as lexical retrieval and motor programming. These tasks, often measured in reaction time (RT), require fast and accurate responses, reflecting maximized participant performance, to result in robust priming effects. Encouraging speed and accuracy in responding can take many forms, including verbal instructions and feedback, and often involves visually displayed RT feedback. However, it is uncertain how manipulation of the schedule of this RT feedback influences speech RT speed and, ultimately, the priming effect. This experiment examined the effect of visually presented RT feedback schedules on priming patterns in 20 older healthy adults. Results suggested that feedback schedule manipulation had a differential effect on reaction time, depending on the interstimulus interval between the prime and the target, but no effect on response priming patterns.

Response priming patterns differ with interstimulus interval duration

Priming paradigms make it possible to study the nature of response preparation before the onset of movement. One way to examine this process is through manipulation of the interstimulus interval (ISI). The timing of the prime and target presentation has been shown to have distinct effects on reaction time patterns, in both healthy and neurologically impaired individuals, during cognitive task switching paradigms and semantic priming studies. What is unclear, however, are the effects of ISI durations on response priming paradigms. In the present study, ISIs of five durations were manipulated within a speech response priming paradigm to investigate reaction time patterns in 25 healthy adults. Results suggested that ISIs have a significant influence on the magnitude of the priming effect. Brief ISIs, with a putatively high sensitivity to reprogramming, resulted in robust priming effects. Long ISIs, thought to be influenced by attentional factors, resulted in priming effects of lesser magnitude.

Masked Repetition and Phonological Priming Within and Across Modalities.

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated this general pattern of effects while introducing a different measure of prime visibility and an orthographic priming condition. Results are interpreted within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model.

Visual semantic features are activated during the processing of concrete words: event-related potential evidence for perceptual semantic priming

There has been conflicting evidence to date regarding the existence of non-strategic semantic priming based on semantic similarity, and in particular on visual–perceptual semantic features (e.g., button–coin: words refer to objects with the same global shape). Both event-related potential (ERP) and reaction time (RT) measures were employed to investigate visual–perceptual semantic priming in a word-pair lexical decision task designed to minimise the contribution of conscious strategic processing. While no RT priming effect was observed, a robust priming effect was obtained on the N400 component of the ERP. This result shows that semantic priming, as indexed by the N400 component, can be supported by nonassociative visual–perceptual semantic relations. The data are consistent with perceptual form information being accessed during the processing of concrete words, and provide support for models of semantic representation which incorporate semantic features and form information.

Single-word shadowing and the study of lexical access

ABSTRACTA new procedure called single-word shadowing was applied to the study of lexical access in context. Subjects listened to word pairs or sentences recorded in one voice and were asked to repeat the target word signaled by a voice shift. This technique yielded rapid and robust priming effects in normal adult subjects in word pairs and in a sentence context. Regression analyses showed that the semantic priming effects were large and significant, even when several additional factors believed to affect lexical access were controlled. Evidence was found for robust semantic priming in the healthy elderly and in children from 7 to 11 years of age, and there was also evidence for a change in the size and nature of context effects across the lifespan. Because single-word shadowing works across a broad age range and does not require reading, secondary tasks, or metalinguistic judgments, it is a promising tool for the study of lexical access in a range of different populations.

Constraints on the range of context-independent priming from ambiguous words

The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the contextually irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words in sentence contexts. The nature of the relationship between prime and target was systematically manipulated. Evidence of priming was obtained when the target was an approximate synonym of the prime (e.g., coach-bus), and when the target was a category coordinate of low similarity, but high category typicality (e.g., raincoat jumper, in Italian). No priming was obtained when the target was event related to the prime (coach-driver), nor when it was a highly similar category co-ordinate (raincoat overcoat, in Italian). However, in these latter cases, robust priming effects were obtained when the prime was presented out of context. The results are discussed in terms of the different kinds of semantic-retrieval operations that may be performed, depending upon whether or not the subjects attend to the meaning of the prime.

Preserved Priming of Novel Objects in Patients with Memory Disorders

Amnesic patients perform poorly on explicit memory tests that require conscious recollection of recent experiences, but frequently show preserved facilitations of performance or priming effects on implicit memory tasks that do not require conscious recollection. We examined implicit memory for novel visual objects on an object decision test in which subjects decide whether structurally possible and impossible objects could exist in three-dimensional form. Patients with organic memory disorders showed robust priming effects on this task---object decision accuracy was higher for previously studied objects than for nonstudied objects---and the magnitude of priming did not differ from matched control subjects or college students. However, patients showed impaired explicit memory for novel visual objects on a recognition test. We argue that priming is mediated by the structural description system, a subsystem of the perceptual representation system, that operates at a presemantic level and is preserved in amnesic patients.