Unconscious congruency priming from unpracticed words is modulated by prime–target semantic relatedness.

Abstract

Participants performed a 2-choice categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded by novel (unpracticed) prime words. The prime words were presented for 33 ms and followed either immediately (Experiments 1-3) or after a variable delay (Experiments 1 and 4) by a pattern mask. Both subjective and objective measures of prime visibility were used in all experiments. On 80% of the trials the primes and targets belonged to different categories (incongruent trials), whereas in the remaining 20% (congruent trials) they could be either strong or weak semantically related category members. Positive congruency effects (reaction times faster on congruent than on incongruent trials) were consistently found, but only when the mask immediately followed the primes, and participants reported being unaware of the identity of the primes. Primes followed by a delayed mask (such that participants reported being aware of their identity) produced either nonreliable facilitation or reliable reversed priming (strategic), depending on whether the prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony was either short (200 ms; Experiments 1 and 4) or long (1,000 ms; Experiment 4). Facilitatory priming with immediate mask was found strong (a) even for participants who performed at chance in prime visibility tests; and (b) for high but not for weakly semantically related category coordinates, irrespective of category size (animals, body parts). These findings provide evidence that unconscious congruency priming by unpracticed words from large stimulus sets critically depends on associative strength and/or semantic similarity between category coexemplars.

The semantic origin of unconscious priming: Behavioral and event-related potential evidence during category congruency priming from strongly and weakly related masked words

“…In support of this argument, some recent studies have consistently demonstrated that stemming from the same semantic category as the target is not sufficient for a masked prime word to elicit reliable congruency priming effects (e.g., Ortells, Marí-Beffa, & Plaza-Ayllón, 2013;Van den Bussche, Smets, Sasanguie, & Reynvoet, 2012). For example, by using a masked congruency priming task Ortells et al (2013) found reliable priming effects from unpracticed prime words, only when they were followed by strongly related, but not by weakly related targets.…”

“…In support of this argument, some recent studies have consistently demonstrated that stemming from the same semantic category as the target is not sufficient for a masked prime word to elicit reliable congruency priming effects (e.g., Ortells, Marí-Beffa, & Plaza-Ayllón, 2013;Van den Bussche, Smets, Sasanguie, & Reynvoet, 2012). For example, by using a masked congruency priming task Ortells et al (2013) found reliable priming effects from unpracticed prime words, only when they were followed by strongly related, but not by weakly related targets. These findings are difficult to explain in terms other than a semantic processing of masked words, as both strongly and weakly related pairs did not differ in terms of either prime-target orthographic overlap, response congruency (e.g., Wentura, 2000), stimulus-response mappings, or action-triggers for semantic categories (Kiesel et al, 2006).…”

“…By adopting this procedure, we tried to prevent participants from using separate strategies for processing the strongly and weakly related word pairs. Second, whereas in the study by Ortells et al (2013) only backward masking was used to render the prime words unidentifiable, in the present experiment the prime words were both preceded and followed by pattern masks, in an attempt to make prime masking more effective and to prevent all tested participants from consciously perceiving the primes. Note on this respect that the overall discrimination scores (i.e., d 0 ) for masked primes in a prime visibility test were clearly above chance performance in all the experiments by Ortells et al (2013).…”

“…The stimulus set was similar to that recently used by Ortells et al (2013;Experiments 2-4). It consisted of 32 concrete and familiar Spanish nouns of 4-6 letters length (16 animals and 16 body-parts) selected from the intra-categorical associative norms published by Callejas, Correa, Lupiáñez, and Tudela (2003).…”

“…It should be noted, however, that in the experiments by Ortells et al (2013) prime-target semantic relatedness was manipulated across different block of trials. We consider it important to replicate the findings of Ortells et al by using a congruency priming task in which strong and weakly related pairs varied randomly from trial-to-trial within the experimental session.…”