The effects on priming of word frequency, number of repetitions, and delay depend on the magnitude of priming

Abstract

Conflicting findings with respect to the effects of experimental manipulations on priming have been reported in previous studies. It is argued that, in many priming tasks, large amounts of task-relevant information are available from various sources, and that, therefore, the information available from a specific study episode will have only a small impact on overall performance level. Under such circumstances, high levels of baseline performance and small priming effects will be observed. The experiments reported here investigated the hypothesis that a high baseline performance in informationprocessing tasks that are used to measure priming may constrain priming effects. In a series of wordnaming experiments, perceptual difficulty and, therefore, baseline performance was manipulated. Under easy conditions, priming effects were relatively small and were not affected by word frequency, spaced repetition, or delay.Under more difficult conditions, priming effects were larger, and significant effects of all of the above-mentioned experimental manipulations were observed. Under conditions that produced the largest priming effects, a significantrelationship between printingand explicit-memory performance could be observed. Inthe last experiment, it was shown that the characteristics of the retrieval task can substantially affect the magnitude of priming. It is argued that priming effects should be considered to reflect interactions between memory traces and the information-processing components of the priming task.Experimental manipulations that significantly affect explicit-memory performance on tasks such as recall or recognition often have little or no significant effect on priming measures that are obtained in tasks such as tachistoscopic identification, lexical decision, and word-stem completion. These variables include massed repetition of studied items, divided versus focused attention, and levels ofprocessing ofthe study items

Regional activation of the human medial temporal lobe during intentional encoding of objects and positions

“…Thus, in one sense, objects were "low frequency" stimuli, while positions were "high frequency" stimuli. Low frequency stimuli are known to be more difficult to process at study phase, although they may be more easily recognized at the test phase (Glanzer and Adams, 1985;Ostergaard, 1998;Diana and Reder, 2006). This may have resulted in the presence of object but not position effects in the present study and in the study by Mitchell et al (2000).…”

Mechanisms underlying perseveration in aphasia: evidence from a single case study

“…Each time a stimulus is repeated, residual activity is presumed to increase a certain amount, making it easier to respond the next time the same stimulus is presented. This suggestion is supported by the observation of repetition priming, faster identification following one or more stimulus repetitions [52,66,71,81]. Perseverations should be more likely following repetition because it will be increasingly difficult to override persistently active representations.…”

“…Words that are low in frequency are less practiced and are named more slowly than high frequency words [18,48]. Frequency has also been shown to influence priming effects across a variety of tasks [3,52,66]. If one assumes that low frequency words have weaker corresponding input, they should elicit a greater number of perseverations than high frequency words because it will be harder for them to override persistently active representations.…”

Healthy aging attenuates task-related specialization in the human medial temporal lobe

“…Objects were thus "low frequency" stimuli, while positions were "high frequency" stimuli. Low frequency stimuli are known to be more difficult to process at study phase, although they may be more easily recognized at the test phase (Diana and Reder, 2006;Glanzer and Adams, 1985;Ostergaard, 1998).…”