title: The direction of masked auditory category priming correlates with participants' prime discrimination ability.
abstract: Semantic priming refers to the phenomenon that participants typically respond faster to targets following semantically related primes as compared to semantically unrelated primes. In contrast, Wentura and Frings (2005) found a negatively signed priming effect (i.e., faster responses to semantically unrelated as compared to semantically related targets) when they used (a) a special masking technique for the primes and (b) categorically related prime-target-pairs (e.g., fruit-apple). The negatively signed priming effect was most pronounced for participants with random prime discrimination performance, whereas participants with high prime discrimination performance showed a positive effect. In the present study we analyzed the after-effects of masked category primes in audition. A comparable pattern of results as in the visual modality emerged: The poorer the individual prime discrimination, the more negative is the semantic priming effect. This result is interpreted as evidence for a common mechanism causing the semantic priming effect in vision as well as in audition instead of a perceptual mechanism only working in the visual domain.
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bermeitinger
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wentura
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Koppermann
authors.forename: Micha
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hauser
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Grass
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Frings