Cross-language positive priming disappears, negative priming does not: Evidence for two sources of selective inhibition

The authors used a unilingual and bilingual primed lexical decision task to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored words. In the unilingual experiment, accelerated lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding target word, whereas slowed lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding ignored nontarget word. In the bilingual (English-Spanish) experiment, between-language, rather than within-language, priming manipulations were used. Although the ignored repetition negative priming effect replicated across languages, cross-language attended repetition positive priming did not. This dissociation of priming effects in the inter- versus intralanguage priming conditions contradicts episodic retrieval accounts of negative priming that deny the existence of selective inhibitory processes. On the other hand, these results support an extension of inhibition-based accounts of negative priming, because they indicate that inhibition can operate at two levels of abstraction--local word and global language--simultaneously.     

ERP Correlates of Effortful Control in Children with Varying Levels of ADHD Symptoms

As effortful control (EC), the self-regulation aspect of temperament, has been argued to play a key role in the normal and psychopathological course of development, research adding to the construct validity of EC is needed. In the current study, interrelations between the temperament construct of EC and the efficiency of the executive attention network, argued to underlie EC, were investigated, using event-related potentials (ERPs). In general, children scoring low on EC questionnaires made more errors of commission in the Go/No-Go task and showed smaller No-Go N2 or No-Go P3 amplitudes, two ERP components related to the executive attention network. The two EC scales (Effortful Control Scale and Attentional Control Scale), used in the current study, were differentially related to the outcome, indicating that they may measure different constructs. No-Go P3 amplitude was noted to be associated more strongly with EC than No-Go N2 amplitude. EC was found to be implicated in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptomatology, as children scoring high on ADHD symptoms scored low on EC questionnaires, made more errors of commission, and showed smaller No-Go P3 amplitudes.     

Semantic priming effects from single words in a lexical decision task

The present research examines the semantic priming effects of a centrally presented single prime word to which participants were instructed to either "attend and remember" or "ignore". The prime word was followed by a central probe target on which the participants made a lexical decision task. The main variables manipulated across experiments were prime duration (50 or 100 ms), the presence or absence of a mask following the prime, and the presence (or absence) and type of distractor stimulus (random set of consonants or pseudowords) on the probe display. There was a consistent interaction between the instructions and the semantic priming effects. Relative to the "attend and remember" instruction, an "ignore" instruction produced reduced positive priming from single primes presented for 100 ms, irrespective of the presence or absence of a prime mask, and regardless of whether the probe target was presented with or without distractors. Additionally, reliable negative priming was found from ignored primes presented for briefer durations (50 ms) and immediately followed by a mask. Methodological and theoretical implications of the present findings for the extant negative priming literature are discussed.     

Negative priming effects that are bigger than a breadbox: Attention to distractors does not eliminate negative priming, it enhances it

In a series of experiments, we examined the effect of requiring subjects to attend to distractors in a test of negative priming. This was accomplished by using a referent size-selection task in which subjects were instructed to name the larger animal and to ignore the smaller animal in a word pair. The result was a quadrupling of the standard negative priming effect, suggesting that negative priming not only occurs for attended distractors, it is actually enhanced. We demonstrated that this enhancement of the effect was not due solely to increased latencies in the referent size-selection task, because neither decreasing base response times in other referent size-selection tasks nor increasing base response times in typical color-selection tasks substantially affected the respective negative priming effects. Although these findings can be accommodated within current theories of negative priming, they challenge the basic assumption that the negative priming effect arises because the critical item was ignored or not attended to on the prime trial.     

Temperamental contributions to children's performance in an emotion-word processing task: a behavioral and electrophysiological study

Seven-year-old children (N=65) participating in a study of the influence of infant temperament on socioemotional development performed an auditory selective attention task involving words that varied in both affective (positive vs. negative) and social (social vs. nonsocial) content. Parent report of contemporaneous child temperament was also collected, and individual differences in self-regulation in the affective (soothability) and cognitive (attentional control) domains were noted. Overall, children showed slower responses to stimuli that were either social or negative in content, with the largest effect elicited by words that possessed both traits. Children rated high in soothability and attentional control showed slower responses to social negative words. The other children showed little to no differential response patterns across the word categories. ERPs collected during the task indicated that processing differences were evident in the later more cognitive components of the ERP, especially in children low in attentional control. These findings indicate that performance on an auditory selective attention task can assist in identifying underlying patterns of affective processing.     

Infant temperament and information processing in a visual categorization task

This study investigates the relation between temperament and information processing in 7-month-old infants. Infant temperament was assessed on multiple dimensions, using mothers' ratings on the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ). Information processing was measured during a paired-comparison visual categorization task. Infants (N=50) were familiarized with five different pairs of visual stimuli from one category, followed by two test trials, each contrasting a novel familiar-category item with a novel out-of-category item (animals vs. vehicles). Drop-out rate in this task was within a normal range (21%). No differences in temperament were found between completers and non-completers, but high reactivity to novelty and low motor activity were positively correlated with the strength of infants' familiarization response. Group comparisons between infants scoring high and low on these two dimensions of temperament confirmed this general finding: infants high on distress to novelty and low on motor activity showed stronger familiarization responses. Furthermore, infants scoring low on motor activity showed a stronger categorization response than highly active infants. This study provides evidence that performance in a cognitive categorization task and dimensions of infant temperament are systematically related during the second half of the first year of life. Implications for cognitive research with infants of this age-range will be discussed.     

Verbal ability modulates the associative neighbors effect

The number of associative neighbors (ANs) of a word has been found to modulate the associative priming effect (Cañas &; Bajo, 1994). Pilot studies have shown that this influence might be dependent on verbal ability. This possibility was examined by comparing the influence of a prime’s ANs on the priming effect in students with high and low verbal ability, using a lexical decision task. Participants with high verbal ability showed a priming effect regardless of ANs. In contrast, low-verbal-ability students showed a significant influence of ANs upon the priming effect, which was demonstrated in responding to related targets. In particular, the lexical decisions to targets that were preceded by primes with a large number of ANs were slower. The effects were not modulated by stimulus onset asynchrony. The results are discussed in relation to automatic and strategic mechanisms of word processing. These findings have important implications for studies in the field of word recognition.     

Repetition priming effects from attended vs. ignored single words in a semantic categorization task

The present research examines priming effects from a centrally presented single-prime word to which participants were instructed to either attend or ignore. The prime word was followed by a single central target word to which participants made a semantic categorization (animate vs. inanimate) task. The main variables manipulated across experiments were attentional instructions (attend vs. ignore the prime word), presentation duration of the prime word (20, 50, 80 or 100 ms), prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 300 vs. 800 ms), and temporal presentation of instructions (before vs. after the prime word). The results showed (a) a consistent interaction between attentional instructions and repetition priming and (b) a qualitatively different ignored priming pattern as a function of prime duration: reduced positive priming (relative to the attend instruction) for prime exposures of 80 and 100 ms, and reliable negative priming for the shorter prime exposures of 20 and 50 ms. In addition (c), the differential priming pattern for attend and ignore trials was observed at a prime-target SOA of 800 ms (but not at a shorter 300-ms SOA) and only when instructions were presented before the prime word. Methodological and theoretical implications of the present findings for the extant negative priming literature are discussed.     

Semantic negative priming in picture categorization and naming

Ignoring a particular stimulus can hamper subsequent attended processing of the same stimulus, a phenomenon known as 'negative priming'. Previous research has yielded partial support for the claim that the effect results from the attentional inhibition of central representations, as suggested by the fact that it appears to extend to semantic associates of ignored stimuli. In the current experiment, participants categorized or named pictorial stimuli with superimposed distractor pictures; the effect of unrelated, identical, or categorically related previously ignored pictures was investigated. Furthermore, visual similarity between categorically related picture pairs was manipulated in the naming task. The results indicated negative priming from identical ignored pictures irrespective of task. However, semantic negative priming was observed in the categorization task only. In the naming task, even visual overlap between categorically related picture pairs failed to induce negative priming. These findings argue against a central locus of the negative priming effect.     

Measuring child temperament: Validation of a 3‐item Temperament Measure and 13‐item Impulsivity Scale

A 3-item Temperament Measure and a 13-item Impulsivity Scale were tested against the 36-item Children's Behaviour Questionnaire (CBQ). Overall, 229 caregivers completed the CBQ and the 3-item Temperament Measure based on the traits of Surgency, Negative Affectivity and Effortful Control as measured by the CBQ. Their children completed the Impulsivity Scale. Psychometrics of the CBQ and the Impulsivity Scale were examined, which were considered good in terms of internal consistency and factorial structure. The three temperament items correlated with the average scores on the corresponding CBQ factors. Furthermore, Surgency was highly related to Impulsivity. Findings provide evidence for the applicability of the Impulsivity and Temperament Measures for research.     

Pictorial and lexical priming: Patterns of implicit memory in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease patients

Lexical and pictorial priming were examined in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in demented and nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease. Control subjects were divided into young and elderly. Lexical priming used a word‐stem completion task. Pictorial priming task was based on Rey's superimposed pictures test. Elderly normal subjects demonstrated lower lexical priming scores than those of young subjects. Analysis of covariance with age and educational level as covariates showed that normal controls, demented and nondemented Parkinsonian patients, and Alzheimer patients did not differ significantly on the lexical priming task. Pictorial priming scores did not differ significantly between elderly and younger controls. In contrast there was a striking impairment of pictorial priming in Parkinsonian patients, both demented and nondemented. Performance of subjects with mild Alzheimer's disease was superior to that of nondemented Parkinsonian patients. Our results suggest that performance in lexical priming task diminishes with physiological ageing but is unaffected by mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease. Our study also observes the existence of a selective pictorial priming deficit in Parkinson's disease; however, this deficit is not specific, as it is also observed to a lesser degree in Alzheimer's disease. It may therefore be concluded that the systems serving pictorial priming are both cortical and subcortical.     

Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children

The current studies used a priming methodology to assess the abstractness of children's early syntactic constructions. In the main study, 3-, 4- and 6-year-old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating either an active or a passive sentence, and then they were left to their own devices to describe a target picture. For half the children at each age, the prime sentences they repeated had high lexical overlap with the sentence they were likely to produce for the target, whereas for the other half there was very low lexical overlap between prime and target. The main result was that 6-year-old children showed both lexical and structural priming for both the active transitive and passive constructions, whereas 3- and 4-year-old children showed lexical priming only. This pattern of results would seem to indicate that 6-year-old children have relatively abstract representations of these constructions, whereas 3- and 4-year-old children have as an integral part of their representations certain specific lexical items, especially pronouns and some grammatical morphemes. In a second study it was found that children did not need to repeat the prime out loud in order to be primed - suggesting that the priming effect observed concerns not just peripheral production mechanisms but underlying linguistic representations common to comprehension and production. These results support the view that young children develop abstract linguistic representations gradually during the preschool years.     

Excitatory and inhibitory priming by attended and ignored non-recycled words with monolinguals and bilinguals

Experiments examining identity priming from attended and ignored novel words (words that are used only once except when repetition is required due to experimental manipulation) in a lexical decision task are reported. Experiment 1 tested English monolinguals whereas Experiment 2 tested Twi (a native language of Ghana, Africa)-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with sequential pairs of stimuli composed of a prime followed by a probe, with each containing two items. The participants were required to name the target word in the prime display, and to make a lexical decision to the target item in the probe display. On attended repetition (AR) trials the probe target item was identical to the target word on the preceding attentional display. On ignored repetition (IR) trials the probe target item was the same as the distractor word in the preceding attentional display. The experiments produced facilitated (positive) priming in the AR trials and delayed (negative) priming in the IR trials. Significantly, the positive and negative priming effects also replicated across both monolingual and bilingual groups of participants, despite the fact that the bilinguals were responding to the task in their non-dominant language.     

The effect of memory load on negative priming: An individual differences investigation

The effect of a verbal (Experiment 1) and a nonverbal (Experiment 2) memory load on negative priming was investigated by employing a concurrent memory task with a letter naming task. Across both experiments, negative priming was reliable only under conditions of zero memory load, suggesting that the processes that contribute to negative priming are resource demanding and dependent on a domain-free resource pool. Individual differences in negative priming were observed, such that high working memory capacity subjects showed reliable negative priming whereas low working memory capacity subjects did not. The results suggest that the negative priming effect results from allocation of controlled attention and that individual differences in working memory capacity correspond to the ability to efficiently handle irrelevant information.     

Inhibitory phonetic priming: Where does the effect come from?

Both phonological and phonetic priming studies reveal inhibitory effects that have been interpreted as resulting from lexical competition between the prime and the target. We present a series of phonetic priming experiments that contrasted this lexical locus explanation with that of a prelexical locus by manipulating the lexical status of the prime and the target and the task used. In the related condition of all experiments, spoken targets were preceded by spoken primes that were phonetically similar but shared no phonemes with the target (/bak/–/dεt/). In Experiments 1 and 2, word and nonword primes produced an inhibitory effect of equal size in shadowing and same–different tasks respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 showed robust inhibitory phonetic priming on both word and nonword targets in the shadowing task, but no effect at all in a lexical decision task. Together, these findings show that the inhibitory phonetic priming effect occurs independently of the lexical status of both the prime and the target, and only in tasks that do not necessarily require the activation of lexical representations. Our study thus argues in favour of a prelexical locus for this effect.     

Influence of prime-probe stimulus onset asynchrony and prime precuing manipulations on semantic priming effects with words in a lexical-decision task

The present research examines semantic priming from attended and unattended parafoveal words. Participants made a lexical decision in response to a single central target. The target was preceded by two parafoveal prime words, with one of them (the attended prime) being precued by a peripheral cue. The main variables manipulated across experiments were cue informativeness (valid vs. neutral cues) and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and probe (200, 300, 600, or 1,000 ms). The results showed (a) reliable semantic priming from both attended and ignored prime words and (b) that the ignored priming effects were either negative or positive, depending on both the prime-probe SOA and cue informativeness. The present findings are discussed in relation to inhibitory versus episodic retrieval models of negative priming.     

An event-related brain potential analysis of visual word priming effects

Two experiments are reported that provide evidence on task-induced effects during visual lexical processing in a prime-target semantic priming paradigm. The research focuses on target expectancy effects by manipulating the proportion of semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task was used and reaction times (RTs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained. In Experiment 2, subjects silently read the stimuli, without any additional task demands, and ERPs were recorded. The RT and ERP results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that an expectancy mechanism contributed to the priming effect when a high proportion of related word pairs was presented. The ERP results of Experiment 2 show that in the absence of extraneous task requirements, an expectancy mechanism is not active. However, a standard ERP semantic priming effect was obtained in Experiment 2. The combined results show that priming effects due to relatedness proportion are induced by task demands and are not a standard aspect of online lexical processing.     

Social priming of dyslexia and reduction of the Stroop effect: What component of the Stroop effect is actually reduced?

Recently, Goldfarb, Aisenberg, and Henik (2011) showed that in a manual format of the Stroop task, dyslexia priming eliminates the normal magnitude of the interference-based Stroop-like findings otherwise exhibited by individuals participating in such research. Goldfarb et al. (2011) consequently concluded that the effect of word reading in a Stroop task (i.e., one automatic behavior) can be effectively controlled through an automatic instruction “do not read” (i.e., another automatic behavior). The present study further investigated these ideas by examining when and how dyslexia priming controls different processes involved in a Stroop task. To this end, the original finding was first replicated (Experiment 1) and subsequently extended to the vocal (instead of manual) response modality to examine whether previously reported eliminations of the Stroop effect persist with this response format (i.e., format producing larger Stroop effects). Since past work (e.g., Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012a; Brown, Joneleit et al., 2002; Ferrand & Augustinova, 2013) had suggested that various interventions were likely to reduce (rather than eliminate) the interference-based Stroop-like findings with vocal responses, a further aim of these experiments was to identify the component of these findings that dyslexia priming actually reduces. To this end, the effects of this intervention were examined in a more fine-grained variant of the Stroop task that distinguished between interference resulting from task-irrelevant processes involved in computing the lexical and semantic representations of the word (i.e., a written distractor to ignore) and task-relevant processes involved in the selection of a response (i.e., a color target to name) that are both involved in this task. In line with our past work (e.g., Augustinova & Ferrand, 2012a; Ferrand & Augustinova, 2013), the results of two experiments (Experiments 2 and 3) showed that in the vocal format, dyslexia priming reduces but does not eliminate the normal magnitude of the interference-based Stroop-like findings and that this reduction is solely due to the control of processes involved in the selection of a response (i.e., a color target to name) – processes that are known to be controllable in this format (Ferrand & Augustinova, 2013). Given that in this format, dyslexia priming had no effect on task-irrelevant processes involved in computing the lexical and semantic representations of a written distractor to be ignored – processes that are known to be automatic – further implications for the control of automatic processes via dyslexia priming are considered and an interpretation in terms of a unitary control mechanism for both the manual and vocal formats is proposed.     

Automatic processes in lexical access and spreading activation.

The semantic priming effect can be reduced or eliminated depending on how the prime word is processed. The experiments reported here investigate this prime task effect. Two experiments used identity and semantic priming tasks to determine whether the prime word is encoded at a lexical level under letter-search conditions. When the prime task was naming, both identity and semantic priming occurred; however, when a letter-search task was performed on the prime word, only identity priming occurred, thus supporting the argument that the search task affects activation of semantic associates rather than lexical access of the prime word. Another experiment demonstrated that this identity priming was the result of lexical processes rather than of letter-by-letter priming. A cross-modal priming technique demonstrated that the letter-search prime task does not actively suppress activation of semantic associates. The implications of these results for automaticity and for proposed mechanisms of priming are discussed.     

Semantic priming in the prime task effect: Evidence of automatic semantic processing of distractors

The automaticity of the semantic processing of words has been questioned because of the reduction of semantic priming when the prime word is processed nonsemantically--for example, in letter search (the prime task effect). In two experiments, prime distractor words produced semantic priming in a subsequent lexical decision task, but with the direction of priming (positive or negative) depending on the prime task. Lexico-semantic tasks produced negative semantic priming, whereas letter search produced positive semantic priming. These results are discussed in terms of task-based inhibition. We argue that, given the results from the distractors, the absence of semantic priming does not indicate an absence of semantic activation but reflects the action of control processes on prepotent responses when less practiced responses are needed.