Being forward not backward: lexical limits to masked priming.

Full Abstract

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make targets unfamiliar. Participants were required to read a target string from right to left (i.e., "ECAF" should be read as "FACE") and then make a response. To examine if priming was based on lexical representations, repetition primes consisted of words when read forwards or backwards (e.g., "face", "ecaf") and nonwords (e.g., "pame", "emap"). Forward and backward primes were used to test if task instruction affected prime encoding. The lexical decision and naming tasks showed the same pattern of results:
priming only occurred for forward primes with word targets (e.g., "face-ECAF"). Additional experiments to test if response priming affected the LDT indicated that the lexical status of the prime per se did not affect target responses. These results showed that the encoding of masked primes was unaffected by the novel task instruction and support the view that masked priming is due to the automatic triggering of pre-established computational processes based on stored information.

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Author information

Author/s: Davis, Chris (C); Kim, Jeesun (J); Forster, Kenneth I (KI);

Affiliation: MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Cognition (Cognition), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-May; vol 107 (issue 2) : pp 673-84

Dates: Created 2008/04/08; Completed 2008/08/19;

PMID: 17765887, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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