Centre-surround inhibition is a general aspect of famous-person recognition: evidence from negative semantic priming from clearly visible primes.
A centre-surround attentional mechanism was proposed by Carr and Dagenbach (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 341-350, 1990) to account for their observations of negative semantic priming from hard-to-perceive primes. Their mechanism cannot account for the observation of negative semantic priming when primes are clearly visible. Three experiments (Ns = 30, 46, and 30) used a familiarity decision with names of famous people, preceded by a prime name with the same occupation as the target or with a different occupation. Negative semantic priming was observed at a 150- or 200-ms SOA, with positive priming at shorter (50-ms) and longer (1,000-ms) SOAs. In Experiment 3, we verified that the primes were easily recognisable in the priming task at an SOA that yielded negative semantic priming, which cannot be predicted by the original centre-surround mechanism. A modified version is proposed that explains transiently negative semantic priming by proposing that centre-surround inhibition is a normal, automatically invoked aspect of the semantic processing of visually presented famous names.
School of Psychology, University of East London, Stratford campus, Stratford, London, UK. A.Stone@uel.ac.uk
Anna
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005197:Famous Persons; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009275:Names; D011581:Psychological Tests; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult