Facilitating and inhibiting effects of priming and selection criteria in a sequence of dichotic trials (original) (raw)
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The processing of a stimulus can be facilitated (positive priming) or impeded (negative priming), depending on whether a repeated stimulus has recently been attended or ignored. The current experiment presented consecutive dichotic syllable pairs with instructions to report any syllable from each pair. The results showed that trials which repeated a syllable from the previous trial had increased response times, and the repeated syllable had a decreased likelihood of being selected. This indicates that inhibition is involved when selecting between stimuli, and that the inhibition associated with stimuli has a residual effect on subsequent selection. Closer examination showed that a repeated syllable was more likely to be ignored if the syllable had been ignored rather than attended on the previous presentation, and trials showing this response pattern had faster response times than trials that did not, thus representing an effect similar to negative priming. We suggest that a biased competition network model, in which pathways are made stronger or weaker as a residual effect of selection, can be applied to account for the observed effect. The model has support from other experimental tasks, and in contrast to prominent accounts of negative priming, it focuses on the processing performed by the network rather than on pre-onset selection criteria for processing.
Endogenous and exogenous control of attention in dichotic listening
Dichotic listening to verbal stimuli results in a right ear advantage (REA), indicating a left hemisphere processing superiority. The magnitude of the REA can be modulated by instructions to direct attention to the left or right ear stimulus. A previous study from our laboratory showed that presenting a prime syllable before the presentation of the dichotic syllables increases reports of the nonprimed syllable, apparently a negative priming effect that inhibits attention to the distracting prime representation. The present study combined attention instruction and priming, making up a 3 x 3 factorial design. The prime stimulus was a single consonant–vowel syllable presented binaurally just before onset of the dichotic consonant–vowel syllables. Results showed that both instructions and priming manipulations had an effect on which dichotic stimulus was selected. There was also a significant interaction between attention instruction and priming manipulation, indicating that the mechanism for instructed attention and the mechanism for negative priming work on the same level of processing.
Psychological Research, 2001
Negative priming is a decrement in performance observed when a previously ignored stimulus is re-presented as a target. The present study examined the relation between selection diculty and negative priming in ®ve experiments that used hierarchical stimuli (large letters made up by small letters). The results show that negative priming is greater when subjects direct attention to the local level (more dicult selection) than when they direct attention to the global level (less dicult selection). However, that occurs only when exposure of prime and probe is suciently long. With shorter presentations, negative priming is still observed but is no longer modulated by selection diculty. These results suggest that both anticipatory and reactive mechanisms are responsible for the occurrence of negative priming and that instantiation of the reactive mechanism depends on the time available for prime and probe selection.
Effects of Competing Speech on Sentence-Word Priming: Semantic Perceptual and Attentional Factors
This study examined the effects of a competing signal on sentence-word priming using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Previous studies have suggested that the facilitatory component of the sentential priming effect is particularly sensitive to acoustic distortions that reduce the perceptibility of the sentence context, whereas the inhibitory component is more sensitive to increased attentional demand. Three competing signal conditions were compared: forward speech presented to a different ear, backward speech presented to a different ear, and forward speech presented to the same ear. The results demonstrate that the competing signal has different effects on priming depending upon the semantic content of the signal and its perceptual isolability from the sentence context.
Repetition priming in an auditory lexical decision task: Effects of lexical status
Memory & Cognition, 1997
The effect of lexical status on the time course of repetition priming was examined in an auditory lexical decision task. Words and nonwords were repeated at lags of 0, 1, 4, and 8 items (Experiment IA) and 0, 2, 4, and 8 items (Experiment lB). The pattern of repetition effects differed for words and nonwords in that repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 was significantly greater than for words. The magnitude of this effect decreased when one or more items intervened. A second experiment, replicating Experiment lA with visual presentation, clarified that the greater magnitude of repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 is unique to the auditory modality.This finding suggests that in the course of forming a stable perceptual representation, the details of the acoustic/phonological information of an auditory stimulus are more readily available for nonwords than for words. The capacity to carry this phonological information is limited, however, and can only be maintained until another stimulus is encountered.
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2011
This study examined the effects of competing speech on auditory semantic comprehension using a dichotic sentence-word priming paradigm. Lexical decision performance for target words presented in spoken sentences was compared in strongly and weakly biasing semantic contexts. Targets were either congruent or incongruent with the sentential bias. Sentences were presented to one auditory channel (right or left), either in isolation or with competing speech produced by a single talker of the same gender presented simultaneously. The competing speech signal was either presented in the same auditory channel as the sentence context, or in a different auditory channel, and was either meaningful (played forward) or unintelligible (time-reversed).Biasing contexts presented in isolation facilitated responses to congruent targets and inhibited responses to incongruent targets, relative to a neutral baseline. Facilitation priming was reduced or eliminated by competing speech presented in the same auditory channel, supporting previous findings that semantic activation is highly sensitive to the intelligibility of the context signal. Competing speech presented in a different auditory channel affected facilitation priming differentially depending upon ear of presentation, suggesting hemispheric differences in the processing of the attended and competing signals. Results were consistent with previous claims of a right ear advantage for meaningful speech, as well as with visual word recognition findings implicating the left hemisphere in the generation of semantic predictions and the right hemisphere in the integration of newly encountered words into the sentence-level meaning. Unlike facilitation priming, inhibition was relatively robust to the energetic and informational masking effects of competing speech and was not influenced by the strength of the contextual bias or the meaningfulness of the competing signal, supporting a two-process model of sentence priming in which inhibition reflects later-stage, expectancy-driven strategic processes that may benefit from perceptual reanalysis after initial semantic activation.
EXEMPLAR EFFECTS ARISE IN A LEXICAL DECISION TASK, BUT ONLY UNDER ADVERSE LISTENING CONDITIONS
This paper studies the influence of adverse listening conditions on exemplar effects in priming experiments that do not instruct participants to use their episodic memories. We conducted two lexical decision experiments, in which a prime and a target represented the same word type and could be spoken by the same or a different speaker. In Experiment 1, participants listened to clear speech, and showed no exemplar effects: they recognised repetitions by the same speaker as quickly as different speaker repetitions. In Experiment 2, the stimuli contained noise, and exemplar effects did arise. Importantly, Experiment 1 elicited longer average RTs than Experiment 2, a result that contradicts the time-course hypothesis , according to which exemplars only play a role when processing is slow. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that exemplar effects arise under adverse listening conditions, when participants are stimulated to use their episodic memories in addition to their mental lexicons.