Priming outside of awareness and subsequent stimulus identification.
The influence of priming outside of awareness on performance of a color-recognition task was investigated. Using a tachistoscope, a color word that matched ("congruent prime") or did not match ("incongruent prime") the target color or a blank prime was followed by a pattern mask and the target color. Identification performance was superior on the blank prime trials to the congruent prime trials, with performance on the incongruent prime trials being the lowest. A subsequent study included a meaningless (XXX) prime condition, and it was found that meaningless primes interfered with target-color identification more than the congruent and blank prime conditions, but less than the incongruent prime condition, suggesting that primes, in addition to producing semantic activation, impose demands on information-processing capacity of the perceptual system.
Dietrich
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Department of Psychology, Hamline University, St. Paul, MN 55104-1284.
Theios
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D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D003118:Color Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D014706:Verbal Learning