Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

In three experiments, we used a masked prime in a verification task to investigate the processing stages occurring during multiplication fact retrieval. We aimed to investigate the retrieval process by overlapping its execution with the processing of a masked prime consisting of a number. Participants evaluated the correctness of multiplication…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of pitch and rhythm priming tasks on sight-reading accuracy and fluency. High school wind instrumentalists (N = 182) were assigned to one of four experimental groups: pre-/posttest rhythm, pre-/posttest pitch, posttest-only rhythm, or posttest-only pitch. Participants sight-read selected…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) found that pop-out search performance is more efficient when a singleton target feature repeats rather than switches from 1 trial to the next--an effect known as priming of pop-out (PoP). They also reported findings indicating that the PoP effect is strongly automatic, as it was unaffected by knowledge of the upcoming…

Transition effects in task-cuing experiments can be partitioned into task switching and cue repetition effects by using multiple cues per task. In the present study, the author shows that cue repetition effects can be partitioned into perceptual and conceptual priming effects. In 2 experiments, letters or numbers in their uppercase/lowercase or…

Given the prevalent use of sight-reading in the classroom, at music festivals, and in audition procedures, it is important to know the most effective practices in preparing students to sight-read musical excerpts. Previous studies suggest that rhythm accuracy is a significant indicator of sight-reading ability. However, others have observed a…

Processing fluency has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on disparate evaluative judgments, including judgments of liking and familiarity. One account of such effects is the hedonic marking hypothesis (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003), which posits that fluency is directly linked to affective preferences via a positive…

Retrieval of proper names is a cause of concern and complaint among elderly adults and it is an early symptom of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). While it is well established that AD patients have deficits of proper name retrieval, the nature of such impairment is not yet fully understood.…

Cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying different forms of priming were investigated using a diffusion model approach. In a series of 6 experiments, effects of prime-target associations and of a semantic and affective categorical match of prime and target were analyzed for different tasks. Significant associative and categorical priming…

Comparison is one of the most ubiquitous and versatile mechanisms in human information processing. Previous research demonstrates that one consequence of comparative thinking is increased judgmental efficiency: Comparison allows for quicker judgments without a loss in accuracy. We hypothesised that a second potential consequence of comparative…

The aim of the study was to undertake a behavioral investigation of the development of automatic orthographic processing during reading acquisition in French. Following Castles and colleagues' 2007 study ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97," 165-182) and their lexical tuning hypothesis framework, substituted-letter and…

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial…

The neural mechanisms that underlie familiarity memory have been extensively investigated, but a consensus understanding remains elusive. Behavioral evidence suggests that familiarity sometimes shares sources with instances of implicit memory known as priming, in that the same increases in processing fluency that give rise to priming can engender…

Among different types of metaphors, lexical metaphors are special in that they have been highly lexicalized and often suggested to be processed like non-metaphorical words. The present study examined two types of Chinese metaphorical words which are conceptualized through body parts. One has both a metaphorical meaning and a literal meaning…