There is growing consensus that selection history strongly guides spatial attention and is distinct from current goals and physical salience. Here, we focused on target-location probability cueing: when the target is more likely to appear in one region, search performance gradually improves for targets appearing in that region. Probability cueing…

Repeating a single-prime stimulus as a target to respond to usually facilitates responses. However, sometimes, prime repetition slows the responses and produces the single-prime negative priming effect. In this study, the distractor set hypothesis was proposed as a mechanism of attentional control that can contribute toward single-prime negative…

Purpose: Target word activation in picture naming was explored in children who stutter (CWS) and typically fluent children (TFC) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Method: A total of 18 CWS and 16 TFC completed a task combining picture naming and probe word identification. On each trial, a picture-to-be-named was followed by an auditory probe…

The process of creative problem-solving (CPS) commonly demands that individuals consciously or unconsciously integrate creative ideas from a vast array of diverse information. Using a masked priming paradigm and the Chinese remote associates test (RAT), this study provides innovative behavioral evidence for the integration of multiple unconscious…

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2 years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

Background: The perceptual similarity between two objects, specifically similarity in the shape of the referents, is a crucial element for relating words in earlier stages of development. The role of this perceptual similarity has not been systematically explored in children with Down syndrome (DS). Method: The aim was to explore the role of…

Creativity is linked to broad scope of attention, a state or trait that allocates attentional resources over a wide range of perceptual stimuli. According to the attentional priming hypothesis, a mechanism underlying the creativity--attention link is that broad perceptual attention scope primes broad conceptual attention scope--the activation of a…

Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar…

In the present study, we showed evidence of an integration between two unconscious semantic representations. In experiment 1, two masked Chinese words of the same or different categories ("orange apple" or "grape hammer") were simultaneously presented in the prime, followed by two Chinese words also of same or different…

Implicit up/down words, such as "bird" and "foot", systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible versus incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the…

Two visual world experiments investigated the priming of form (e.g., phonology) during language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard high cloze probability sentences like "In order to have a closer look, the dentist asked the man to open his . . ." while viewing visual arrays with objects like a predictable target mouth,…

This study measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test competing hypotheses regarding the effects of anger and race on early visual processing (N1, P2, and N2) and error recognition (ERN and Pe) during a sequentially primed weapon identification task. The first hypothesis was that anger would impair weapon identification in a biased…

Perceptual learning accounts of orthographic coding predict that transposed-letter (TL) priming effects should be smaller when the prime and target stimuli are not presented in their canonical (left-to-right horizontal in English) orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, abstract letter…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…