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Lin, C-Y, & Ryan, L. (2004). Repetition priming with and without identification of the primes. Poster presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA.

Priming refers to a change in the speed or accuracy of the processing of a stimulus, following prior experience with the same, or a related, stimulus. The masked priming paradigm has shown that even when the subjects were not consciously aware of the briefly presented primes, priming effect could still occur. However, it is still debatable that whether or not the conscious identification of the primes is necessary for the long-term priming effect, where the SOAs are longer than at least few seconds (e.g. several other items intervene between the prime and target). Here we used a mirror-word identification paradigm to examine this. Words in mirror-image orientation were presented on the computer screen and subjects pressed a button as soon as they identified the word. Primes and targets were intermixed by a pseudo-random order. The results showed that the mean reaction time for the targets proceeded by unidentified primes (1137 ± 319 ms) was significantly shorter than the corresponding control group’s (1867 ± 692 ms), however, the mean reaction time for the targets proceeded by identified primes (868 ± 184 ms) was not significantly different from the corresponding control group’s (935 ± 225 ms). This result did not replicate our previous findings (identified primes produced priming effects) with the similar design. We discussed the possible reasons and the implication for our following fMRI study using this same paradigm.