The notion that inhibitory processes play a critical role in selective attention has gained wide support. Much of this support derives from studies of negative priming. The authors note that the attribution of negative priming to an inhibitory mechanism of attention draws its support from a common assumption underlying priming procedures, together with the procedure that has been used to measure negative priming. The results from a series of experiments demonstrate that selection between 2 competing prime items is not required to observe negative priming. This result is demonstrated across several experiments in which participants named 1 of 2 items in a second display following presentation of a single-item prime. The implications of these results for existing theories of negative priming are discussed, and a theoretical framework for interpreting negative priming and several related phenomena is forwarded.

Semantic priming is traditionally viewed as an effect that rapidly decays. A new view of long-term word priming in attractor neural networks is proposed. The model predicts long-term semantic priming under certain conditions. That is, the task must engage semantic-level processing to a sufficient degree. The predictions were confirmed in computer simulations and in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 showed that when target words are each preceded by multiple semantically related primes, there is long-lag priming on a semanticdecision task but not on a lexical-decision task. Experiment 2 replicated the long-term semantic priming effect for semantic decisions with only one prime per target. Experiment 3 demonstrated semantic priming with much longer word lists at lags of 0, 4, and 8 items. These are the first experiments to demonstrate a semantic priming effect spanning many intervening items and lasting much longer than a few seconds.Many forms of priming have been studied (for reviews, see Monsell, 1985;Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988;Schacter, 1987). Whereas in repetition priming the priming stimulus is identical to the target, in similarity-based priming tests (e.g., form priming, morphological priming, and semantic priming), the prime and target are different words sharing some surface features, semantic features, or both. Repetition priming and form priming have been found to produce long-lasting effects ranging from hours to weeks or even months (e.g., Bentin & Feldman, 1990; Bentin & Moscovitch, 1988;Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Rueckl, 1990;Sloman, Hayman, Ohta, Law, & Tulving, 1988). Semantic priming, however, is traditionally thought to produce only short-term effects that dissipate after several seconds or after more than one item intervenes between prime and target stimuli. Is it possible that completely different priming mechanisms are operating at semantic levels of processing as compared with other levels at which priming could occur? The most parsimonious account would be that the same mechanisms operate at all levels of the system. In this article, we are concerned particularly with long-term priming and argue in favor of a single mechanism to account for all types of long-term priming. Our view is that short-term semantic priming involves a process completely different from that underlying long-term priming, but either type of process should behave according to the same computational principles at any level of the system, whether it be perceptual or semantic. Although our account of long-term priming is very general, our focus is specifically on semantic priming because our model makes novel predictions in this domain. We first present a theoretical account of long-term priming based on a distributed cormectionist model of word recognition, combined with some very general learning-processing assumptions. The theory specifies conditions under which long-term priming should occur and predicts that semantic priming should produce long-term effects under the appropriate conditions (even though it has not been fo...

No abstract

The authors use the qualitative differences logic to demonstrate that 2 separate memory influences underlie performance in recognition memory tasks, familiarity and recollection. The experiments focus on the mirror effect, the finding that more memorable stimulus classes produce higher hit rates but lower false-alarm rates than less memorable stimulus classes. The authors demonstrate across a number of experiments that manipulations assumed to decrease recollection eliminate or even reverse the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect while leaving the false-alarm portion intact. This occurs whether the critical distinction between conditions is created during the test phase or manipulated during the study phase. Thus, when recollection is present, it dominates familiarity so that the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect primarily reflects recollection; when recollection is largely absent, the opposite pattern associated with the familiarity process emerges.

A number of reports claim that humans perform lexical decisions faster to words with many meanings than to words with only one meaning. It is a challenge to simulate this ambiguity effect with a parallel distributed processing model because activation of ambiguous words produces competition at the semantic level; this ought to lead to less rather than more efficient processing of ambiguous words. Despite this problem, the present simulations show that it is possible to produce an ambiguity effect when the network settles into a learned semantic pattern through use of a proximity factor. However, competition is not completely countered by proximity as the network fails to settle into a learned semantic pattern for ambiguous words on more than 50% of the trials. Further simulations show that manipulations that increase the proportion of correct settling result in the loss of this ambiguity effect. General implications are discussed.