The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of automatic target activation and/or the use of strategies like prospective expectancy generation and retrospective semantic matching. This article investigates the extent that these processes rely on cognitive resources by experimentally manipulating working memory load. To disentangle prospective and retrospective processes, prime-target pairs were selected such that they were symmetrically associated (e.g., answer-question; SYM) or asymmetrically associated in either the forward direction (e.g., panda-bear; FA) or the backward direction (e.g., ball-catch; BA). The results showed that priming for FA pairs completely evaporated under a high working memory load but that it remained stable for BA and SYM pairs. This was taken to mean that prospective processes, which are assumed to cause FA priming, require cognitive resources, whereas retrospective processes, which lead to BA priming, are relatively effortless.

Continuous flash suppression (CFS) has been used as a paradigm to probe the extent to which word stimuli are processed in the absence of awareness. In the two experiments reported here, no evidence is obtained that word stimuli are processed up to the semantic level when suppressed through CFS. In Experiment 1, word stimuli did not break suppression faster than their pseudo-word variants nor was suppression time modulated by word frequency. Experiment 2 replicated these findings, but more critically showed that differential effects can be obtained with this paradigm using a simpler stimulus. In addition, pixel density of the stimuli did prove to be related to suppression time in both experiments, indicating that the paradigm is sensitive to differences in detectability. A third and final experiment replicated the well-known face inversion effect using the same set-up as Experiments 1 and 2, thereby demonstrating that the employed methodology can capture more high-level effects as well. These results are discussed in the context of previous evidence on unconscious semantic processing and two potential explanations are advanced. Specifically, it is argued that CFS might act at a level too low in the visual system for high-level effects to be observed or that the widely used breaking CFS paradigm is merely ill-suited to capture effects in the context of words.

Science is often perceived to be a self-correcting enterprise. In principle, the assessment of scientific claims is supposed to proceed in a cumulative fashion, with the reigning theories of the day progressively approximating truth more accurately over time. In practice, however, cumulative self-correction tends to proceed less efficiently than one might naively suppose. Far from evaluating new evidence dispassionately and infallibly, individual scientists often cling stubbornly to prior findings. Here we explore the dynamics of scientific self-correction at an individual rather than collective level. In 13 written statements, researchers from diverse branches of psychology share why and how they have lost confidence in one of their own published findings. We qualitatively characterize these disclosures and explore their implications. A cross-disciplinary survey suggests that such loss-of-confidence sentiments are surprisingly common among members of the broader scientific population yet rarely become part of the public record. We argue that removing barriers to self-correction at the individual level is imperative if the scientific community as a whole is to achieve the ideal of efficient self-correction.