The Effect of Asymmetrical Association on Positive and Negative Semantic Priming

Overview

Journal Mem Cognit

Specialty Psychology

Date 2003 Mar 29

PMID 12661857

Citations 6

Authors

Keith A Hutchison

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

One's actively ignoring a stimulus can impair subsequent responding to that stimulus. This negative priming effect has been argued to generalize to semantically related items as well, but the evidence for this is still somewhat weak. This article presents a new experiment in which participants made lexical decisions to asymmetrically associated prime-target pairs presented in either the forward (e.g., stork-baby) or backward (e.g., baby-stork) direction. The critical new finding was that both attended positive and ignored negative semantic priming occurred only for prime-target pairs presented in the forward direction. The results support either (1) a spreading inhibition model in which items associated with an ignored distractor are inhibited during prime selection or (2) a version of episodic retrieval theory in which the prime distractor and items associated with it are tagged as "to-be-ignored" during prime selection.

Citing Articles

The neural correlates of priming emotion and reward systems for conflict processing in alcoholics.

Schulte T, Jung Y, Sullivan E, Pfefferbaum A, Serventi M, Muller-Oehring E Brain Imaging Behav. 2016; 11(6):1751-1768.

PMID: 27815773 PMC: 5418124. DOI: 10.1007/s11682-016-9651-1.

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity Modulates Semantic Negative Priming from Single Prime Words.

Ortells J, Noguera C, Alvarez D, Carmona E, Houghton G Front Psychol. 2016; 7:1286.

PMID: 27621716 PMC: 5002416. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01286.

Gamma- and theta-band synchronization during semantic priming reflect local and long-range lexical-semantic networks.

Mellem M, Friedman R, Medvedev A Brain Lang. 2013; 127(3):440-51.

PMID: 24135132 PMC: 3864756. DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2013.09.003.

Congruency effects in the letter search task: semantic activation in the absence of priming.

Hutchison K, Bosco F Mem Cognit. 2007; 35(3):514-25.

PMID: 17691150 DOI: 10.3758/bf03193291.

Semantic generalization of stimulus-task bindings.

Waszak F, Hommel B, Allport A Psychon Bull Rev. 2005; 11(6):1027-33.

PMID: 15875971 DOI: 10.3758/bf03196732.

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