Dynamic Adaptation to History of Trial Difficulty Explains the Effect of Congruency Proportion on Masked Priming

Autor/inn/en	Kinoshita, Sachiko; Mozer, Michael C.; Forster, Kenneth I.
Titel	Dynamic Adaptation to History of Trial Difficulty Explains the Effect of Congruency Proportion on Masked Priming
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140 (2011) 4, S.622-636 (15 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0096-3445
DOI	10.1037/a0024230
Schlagwörter	Priming; Reaction Time; Difficulty Level; Cognitive Processes; Undergraduate Students; Foreign Countries; Australia + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Reaktionsvermögen; Schwierigkeitsgrad; Cognitive process; Kognitiver Prozess; Ausland; Australien
Abstract	In reaction time research, there has been an increasing appreciation that response-initiation processes are sensitive to recent experience and, in particular, the difficulty of previous trials. From this perspective, the authors propose an explanation for a perplexing property of masked priming: Although primes are not consciously identified, facilitation of target processing by a related prime is magnified in a block containing a high proportion of related primes and a low proportion of unrelated primes relative to a block containing the opposite mix (Bodner & Masson, 2001). In the present study, this phenomenon is explored with a parity (even/odd) decision task in which a prime (e.g., 2) precedes a target that can be either congruent (e.g., 4) or incongruent (e.g., 3). It is shown that the effect of congruence proportion with masked primes cannot be explained in terms of the blockwise prime-target contingency. Specifically, with masked primes, there is no congruency disadvantage in a block containing a high proportion of incongruent primes, but there is a congruency advantage when the block contains an equal proportion of congruent and incongruent primes. In qualitative contrast, visible primes are sensitive to the blockwise prime-target contingency. The authors explain the relatedness proportion effect found with masked primes in terms of a model according to which response-initiation processes adapt to the statistical structure of the environment, specifically the difficulty of recent trials. This account is supported with an analysis at the level of individual trials using the linear mixed effects model. (Contains 6 tables, 5 figures and 6 footnotes.) (As Provided).
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Update	2017/4/10