title: The semantic origin of unconscious priming: Behavioral and event-related potential evidence during category congruency priming from strongly and weakly related masked words.
abstract: The mechanisms underlying masked congruency priming, semantic mechanisms such as semantic activation or non-semantic mechanisms, for example response activation, remain a matter of debate. In order to decide between these alternatives, reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in the present study, while participants performed a semantic categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded either 167 ms (Experiment 1) or 34 ms before (Experiment 2) by briefly presented (33 ms) novel (unpracticed) masked prime words. The primes and targets belonged to different categories (unrelated), or they were either strongly or weakly semantically related category co-exemplars. Behavioral (RT) and electrophysiological masked congruency priming effects were significantly greater for strongly related pairs than for weakly related pairs, indicating a semantic origin of effects. Priming in the latter condition was not statistically reliable. Furthermore, priming effects modulated the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, an electrophysiological index of semantic processing, but not ERPs in the time range of the N200 component, associated with response conflict and visuo-motor response priming. The present results demonstrate that masked congruency priming from novel prime words also depends on semantic processing of the primes and is not exclusively driven by non-semantic mechanisms such as response activation.
authors.affiliation: University of Almería, Spain. Electronic address: jortells@ual.es.
authors.forename: Juan J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Ortells
authors.affiliation: University of Ulm, Germany.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kiefer
authors.affiliation: University of Murcia, Spain.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Castillo
authors.affiliation: University of Almería, Spain.
authors.forename: Montserrat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Megías
authors.affiliation: University of Almería, Spain.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Morillas
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Mechanisms of unconscious priming; N400 priming effect; Prime-target semantic relatedness; Unconscious category congruency priming; Unconscious semantic processing; Visual masking