BACKGROUND Previous research has yielded evidence for enhanced semantic priming in formal thought-disordered schizophrenia patients, a result that fits well with the hypothesis of disinhibited processes of spreading activation in this population. METHODS The present study tested this hypothesis by using masked repetition priming, which yields reversed semantic priming effects in healthy parti...

Semantic priming between words is reduced or eliminated if a low-level task such as letter search is performed on the prime word (the prime task effect), a finding used to question the automaticity of semantic processing of words. This idea is critically examined in 3 experiments with a new design that allows the search target to occur both inside and outside the prime word. The new design prod...

This study addresses the relationship between impulsivity and lack of inhibition. Inhibition was measured both by the interference score and by the negative priming effect in a Stroop colour-word paradigm. The negative priming effect in this paradigm is defined by slower naming of a target colour if this colour was the distractor in the immediately preceding trial. For the study, a total of 210...

Subliminal words cause behavioral priming, yet the depth of their processing remains debated. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), Nakamura et al. demonstrate in this issue of Neuron that this subliminal priming effect can be selectively disrupted. Distinct TMS sites disrupt priming in lexical decision and pronunciation tasks, suggesting that task set influences subliminal processing.

Two lexical priming experiments were conducted to examine effects of grammatical structure of Chinese two-constituent compounds on their recognition. The target compound words conformed to two types of grammatical structure: subordinate and coordinative compounds. Subordinate compounds follow a structure where the first constituent modifies the second constituent (e.g., , meaning snowball); her...

In the affective misattribution procedure (AMP), pairs of prime and target stimuli appear rapidly in succession. Attitudes toward the prime influence the evaluation of the target despite instructions to avoid this influence. Because this priming effect presumably happens without people's knowledge, the AMP is used to study automatic evaluation. Participants in four studies performed the AMP and...

In this study, English-French bilinguals performed a lexical decision task while reaction times (RTs) and event related potentials (ERPs) were measured to L2 targets, preceded by noncognate L1 translation primes versus L1 unrelated primes (Experiment 1a) and vice versa (Experiment 1b). The prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony was 120 ms. Significant masked translation priming was observed, in...

This study investigated the processes underlying the effect of masked syllable priming in French with pseudoword primes and word targets. Two lexical-decision task (LDT) experiments examined whether the syllable priming effect depends on syllable frequency and might rely on a general abstract structure. The results of Experiment 1 revealed an inhibitory priming effect, with pseudoword primes an...

We investigated distractor processing in a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task containing familiar objects, by measuring repetition priming from a priming distractor (PD) to Target 2 (T2). Priming from a visually identical PD was contrasted with priming from a PD in a different orientation from T2. We also tested the effect of attention on distractor processing, by placing ...