To test whether humans can encode words during sleep we played everyday words to men while they were napping and assessed priming from sleep-played words following waking. Words were presented during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Priming was assessed using a semantic and a perceptual priming test. These tests measured differences in the processing of words that had been or had not been p...

N400, an event-related brain potential (ERP) waveform elicited by meaningful stimuli, is normally reduced by stimulus repetition (N400 repetition priming), and relatedness between the eliciting stimulus and preceding ones (relatedness priming). Schizophrenia patients' N400 relatedness priming deficits suggest impairment in using meaningful prime stimuli to facilitate processing of related conce...

A classical definition of automaticity establishes that automatic processing occurs without attention or consciousness, and cannot be controlled. Previous studies have demonstrated that semantic priming can be reduced if attention is directed to a low-level of analysis. This finding suggests that semantic processing is not automatic since it can be controlled. In this paper, we present two expe...

Although there are numerous theories of the structure of semantic memory, a notion central to many of these theories is that of semantic category membership. The present studies represent an investigation of the effects of a semantic category relation between prime and target in a picture-naming task. Because picture naming is presumed to require access to semantic memory, category priming effe...

Studies using backward masked emotional stimuli suggest that affective processing may occur outside visual awareness and imply primacy of affective over semantic processing, yet these experiments have not strictly controlled for the participants' awareness of the stimuli. Here we directly compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization of biologically relevant stimuli in 5 expe...

The reported studies have aimed to investigate whether informational masking in a multi-talker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target using an adapted semantic priming paradigm. In 3 experiments, participants were required to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in backgrounds composed of 1-4 voices. These voices were Semantically Consi...

Researchers examining selective attentional mechanisms in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often report impairment in patients' ability to inhibit irrelevant or distracting information. However, in many studies reporting such failures, researchers used tasks that require semantic processing, which a large body of literature documents to be disrupted in AD. The authors of this study used a...

Knowledge of familiar people is essential to guide social interaction, yet there is uncertainty about whether semantic knowledge for people is stored in a categorical structure as for objects. Four priming experiments using hard-to-perceive primes investigated whether occupation forms a category connecting famous persons in semantic memory. Primes were famous faces exposed for 17ms with masking...

Numerous studies have reported neurophysiological effects of semantic priming in electroencephalography (EEG) and in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Because of differing methodological constraints, the comparability of the observed effects remains unclear. To directly compare EEG and fMRI effects and neural sources of semantic priming, we conducted a semantic word-picture priming ...

Difficulties in person recognition are among the common complaints associated with cognitive ageing. The present series of experiments therefore investigated face and person recognition in young and older adults. The authors examined how within-domain and cross-domain repetition as well as semantic priming affect familiar face recognition and analyzed both behavioral and event-related brain pot...