SOA does not reveal the absolute time course of cognitive processing in fast priming experiments

Boaz Tzur, Ram Frost*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Applying Bloch's law to visual word recognition research, both exposure duration of the prime and its luminance determine the prime's overall energy, and consequently determine the size of the priming effect. Nevertheless, experimenters using fast-priming paradigms traditionally focus only on the SOA between prime and target to reflect the absolute speed of cognitive processes under investigation. Some of the discrepancies in results regarding the time course of orthographic and phonological activation in word recognition research may be due to this factor. This hypothesis was examined by manipulating parametrically the luminance of the prime and its exposure duration, measuring their joint impact on masked repetition priming. The results show that small and non-significant priming effects can be more than tripled as a result of simply increasing luminance, when SOA is kept constant. Moreover, increased luminance may compensate for briefer exposure duration and vice versa.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)321-335
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Memory and Language
Volume56
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2007

Keywords

  • Luminance
  • Masked priming
  • Phonological computation
  • SOA
  • Visual word recognition

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