Interference and facilitation effects of primes upon verification processes

Abstract

Priming effects on sentence verification were investigated. The semantic relation of the prime and the probe, and the interval between prime and probe presentation (SOA), were varied for both ambiguous and unambiguous sentences. Reaction time to decide that a sentence was true or false was longer if the preceding prime was a word that was unrelated to the probe than if the prime was the word "blank." In contradiction of Posner and Snyder's (1975) claim that conscious processes develop slowly, this result was found at SOAs as short as 250 msec. Verification performance was facilitated for both sentence types when the prime word was the first of the to-bepresented probe sentence, but the magnitude of the facilitation effects depended upon the truth value of the probe, the associative strength of the subject and predicate of the probe sentence, and upon SOA. These findings indicate that priming affects the processing of relations among concepts in semantic memory, as well as the encoding of the probe.The processing of an input by our perceptual and memory systems has immediate consequences for succeeding inputs to those information processing systems. The manner in which some initial "priming" stimulus affects a response to a subsequent stimulus depends upon how the successive inputs are related on perceptual and semantic dimensions. Priming effects do not depend solely upon the relation between the long-term representations of the prime and probe stimulus, however. The direction and magnitude of priming effects also depend upon the validity of the prime as a predictor of the probe stimulus and upon the length of the interval between presentation of the prime and presentation of the probe. Under what conditions does a prime facilitate or interfere with retrieval of information from memory? What is the role of the time interval between prime and probe presentation? How do priming effects depend upon the nature of the probe and its relation to the prime? Using a semantic verification task, we have addressed such questions in the experiments reported in this paper.Most of the previous research on priming has employed a lexical decision task which requires the subject to determine whether a letter string is a word. The interesting result in this task is that subjects detect a word faster when it has been preceded by a semantically related word than when it has been preceded by an unrelated word or by a neutral stimulus (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). This facilitation effect has generally

Associative facilitation of word recognition as measured from a neutral prime

“…We preferred the word "blanco" (blank), because the word "neutraal" (neutral) is considerably longer than the mean length of the word primes in Experiment 2, below. The "blank" baseline prime has been successfully used by Myers and Lorch (1980) in a sentence-verification paradigm. The matter seems especially worthy of further investigation because the difference in processing times for word-pseudoword and crosses-pseudoword trials is the only effect in Experiment 1 that is reliable both on the subject analysis and on the item analysis.…”

“…The third property was held responsible for the inhibiting effects caused by the attentional component. Some recent studies (Antos, 1979;Fischler & Bloom, 1980;Myers & Lorch, 1980), however, show that inhibition is found with SOAs as small as 200 msec and that it is sometimes difficult to avoid. Both fmdings suggest that inhibition can be produced by "automatic" processes as well.…”

“…Whether it is active depends on the proportion of related prime-target pairs presented to the subjects (Tweedy, Lapinski, & Schvaneveldt, 1977); whether it is effective depends on the SOA. Presumably, for attention to be effective, the SOA must be longer than the SOA at which the earliest effects of automatic spreading activation are observed, since facilitation and inhibition from conscious attention build up slower than facilitation caused by spreading activation (Neely, 1977;Posner & Snyder, 1975; but see Antos, 1979;Fischler & Bloom, 1979;Myers & Lorch, 1980). With respect to such a conscious component, we can make several predictions about recognition times of strong and weak associates: Strong associates will probably often be correctly predicted from the prime and will consequently be facilitated by conscious attention.…”

Development of a Brief Measure of Semantic Priming

“…Finally, most semantic priming paradigms have been validated using healthy subjects involving large word lists of as many as 400 word pairs, requiring close to 1 hr to administer (e.g., Myers & Lorch, 1980). Often these lists are too lengthy for patients with memory disorders who may have limited capacity for sustained attention.…”

Early interference in a priming task with brief masked targets.

“…Results showed facilitation at all SOAs but significant inhibition only at 400 and 2000 ms in conditions where the subject's attention was misdirected. However, Antos (1979) found in a lexical decision task that invalid cues did produce interference at SOAs of 200 ms. Myers and Lorch (1980) point out that Necly's lexical decision task requires little in the way of semantic processing. In a semantic verification task, they found significant interference at their shortest SOA which was 250 ms. Posner (1978) interprets this evidence of early interference as indicative of an early commitment of conscious attention, thus giving up the distinction between fast, automatic processes and slow, deliberate, conscious processes.…”