Abstract
Immediately prior to each visually presented target letter string to which the subject made a speeded word-nonword classification response, a visually presented prime to which no overt response was required was shown for 360, 600, or 2,000 msec. For word (W) target trials, the priming event was either a semantically neutral warning signal (Condition NX), a word semantically related to the target word (Condition R), or a word semantically unrelated to the target word (Condition U); for nonword (N) target trials, the priming event was either the neutral warning signal (Condition NX) or a word prime (Condition WP). For the W target trials, reaction times (RTs) were slower in Condition U than in Condition NX and equally so for all three prime durations; RTs were faster in Condition R than in Condition NX and to a greater degree for the 600- and 2,000-msec prime durations than for the 360-msec prime duration. For the N targets, RTs were faster in Condition WP than in Condition NX and equally so for all prime durations. These results were interpreted within the framework of a two-factor theory of attention proposed by Posner and Snyder (1975a).
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Meyer, D. E., Schvaneveldt, R. W., &. Ruddy, M. G.Activation of lexical memory. Paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, November 1972.
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This research was supported by Grant 40310X to Dr. Michael I. Posner from the National Science Foundation and was conducted while Dr. Posner was a Visiting Professor at Yale and while the author was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow.
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Neely, J.H. Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Evidence for facilitatory and inhibitory processes. Memory & Cognition 4, 648–654 (1976). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213230
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213230