Inhibition from semantically related primes: Evidence of a category-specific inhibition

Abstract

The phenomenon of inhibition from generating successive items within a category, reported by A. S. Brown (1981), was examined in two experiments. Subjects responded on target trials by either generating targets (e.g., generating BASS to B when it followed the category name FISH, Experiment 1) or reading them (reading BASS when it followed the category name FISH, Experiment 2). Prior to target trials, all subjects received priming trials consisting of either one or four exemplars from a single semantic category, which could be either the same category as the target's category (related priming condition) or an unrelated category (unrelated priming condition). In both experiments, different groups of subjects either read or generated primes. When primes were read, target response times (RTs) were always facilitated in the related priming condition compared with in the unrelated priming condition. However, when primes were generated, this facilitation from related primes was eliminated, except in the one-prime condition, when targets were also generated. When primes and targets were both generated, RTs in the related priming condition were slower following four primes than following one prime. Thus, category-specific inhibition from multiple related primes is greatest when both primes and targets must be actively retrieved.Recent presentation of material semantically related to target information typically facilitates the processing or retrieval of that target information. For example, in a lexical (word-nonword) decision task, subjects are faster to respond that the letter string "nurse" is a word when it has been primed by a semantically related word such as "doctor" rather than by an unrelated word such as "butter" (

Semantic satiation affects category membership decision time but not lexical priming

“…However, the evidence of inhibition from prior exposure to semantically related material is derived from a variety of methodologies, including episodic recognition (Neely, Schmidt, & Roediger, 1983;Roediger & Neely, 1982) and recall (Mueller & Watkins, 1977), alphanumeric matching (Neill, 1979), target generation (Blaxton & Neely, 1983;Brown, 1981), and category matching (under certain conditions; Rosch, 1975). A theoretical integration of that literature with the present data will not be attempted here.…”

“…First, given that nonexemplars showed no effect of satiation in the category membership task, we might hypothesize that the effect of satiation may be limited to reducing the accessibility of (the meaning of) exemplars of the category. Subjects may covertly but actively retrieve many exemplars from the category in anticipation of an exemplar target (Blaxton & Neely, 1983). To sustain retrieval of new candidate target exemplars during the extended, 3Q-repetition period, items that had been retrieved initially might need to be inhibited, effectively increasing RT for these latter items.…”

“…To sustain retrieval of new candidate target exemplars during the extended, 3Q-repetition period, items that had been retrieved initially might need to be inhibited, effectively increasing RT for these latter items. A variant of this position is that prolonged retrieval of intracategory items may instill a global retrieval block of exemplars (see Blaxton & Neely, 1983, Keele & Neill, 1978, and Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981. Accounts of this type assume that the observed effect of satiation arises not from repetition and satiation of the category name per se, but from prolonged implicit recollection of exemplars.…”

Target strength and retrieval-induced forgetting in semantic recall

“…Thus, inhibition of competitors would be generated when retrieval is attempted, but not when a fact is only read or studied (cf. Blaxton & Neely, 1983;Storm, Bjork, & Bjork, 2006). Studying (but not retrieving) a fact, however, would be expected to increase its cue-target strength and produce interference.…”

Dynamic memory searches: Selective output interference for the memory of facts

“…For example, in Blaxton and Neely (1983), participants were slower to generate a category exemplar when they had previously generated several exemplars from the same category relative to when they had generated only one member from the category. Response time as a function of trial is similar to that observed in retrieval from episodic memory in free recall (e.g., Rohrer & Wixted, 1994), potentially leading to the conclusion that OI in episodic and semantic memory is comparable.…”