Abstract
When two targets are presented using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and the interval between the targets is 200–500 ms, report of the second target is impaired, a phenomena known as the attentional blink (AB). This study examined the time course of semantic-only and associate–semantic priming effects during an AB task. Three RSVP experiments were conducted using targets that shared either a semantic-only or an associative–semantic relationship. The results of the three experiments demonstrated semantic-only priming effects at the shortest stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Associative–semantic priming was evident at shorter and longer SOAs. This suggests that priming in an AB task is driven by conceptual overlap facilitating lexical access at short SOAs and with longer SOAs lexical access benefits from word associations links between targets.
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Priming is a performance advantage for trials in which the two target words are related compared with trials presenting two unrelated target words. That is, there is a reduced AB when T1 and T2 are related compared with when the targets are unrelated.
An associative only related condition was not included in these experiments as it was impossible to select enough words that were categorically unrelated and related based on word association norms that could be matched with the associative–semantic and semantic-only lists on word frequency, number of letters, and neighbourhood size.
The word frequency of T1 was lower than for T2 within each pair. This pairing of a lower frequency T1 with a slightly higher frequency T2 was preserved in the creation of the unrelated word pairs for the semantic-only and associative–semantic conditions. It reflects the use of highly associated words in the associate–semantic condition and selecting semantic-only words to match. The lower frequency T1 would have produced conservative priming effects in this study due to being more easily identified as the first target in the RSVP stream and as the DV T2/T1 is based on the higher frequency word. Hence, the impact of word frequency effects contributing to our data would have been minimal and consistent across both word types and all three experiments. We thank an anonymous reviewing for drawing our attention to this issue.
We thank Anna Woollams for this suggestion.
Consistency in orthographic overlap between word pairs in the semantic-only and associate–semantic conditions in each of three experiments was assessed to ensure minimal impact of orthographic differences on the priming effects in this study. There was no difference in total letter overlap regardless of position and exact letter position overlap between word sets across the three experiments (ps > .05). We thank an anonymous reviewing for drawing our attention to this issue.
As with Experiment 1, the T1–T2 word frequency differences (lower frequency for T1) remained in the generation of the unrelated word pairs except for 4 T1-T2 pairs where T1 had a slightly higher word frequency than T2. This is unlikely to account for the priming effects observed in Experiment 2 or 3.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Jason Andalis for his assistance with the data collection for Experiment 1 and the programing of the experiments. We thank Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript.
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Murphy, K., Hunt, H. The time course of semantic and associative priming effects is different in an attentional blink task. Cogn Process 14, 283–292 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0560-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-013-0560-6