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…

The majority of research examining infants' decontextualized word knowledge comes from studies in which words and pictures are presented simultaneously. However, comprehending utterances about unseen objects is a hallmark of language. Do infants demonstrate decontextualized absent object knowledge early in the second year of life? Further, to what…

Recent reports have suggested that the attended features of an item may be rapidly forgotten once they are no longer relevant for an ongoing task (attribute amnesia). This finding relies on a surprise memory procedure that places high demands on declarative memory. We used intertrial priming to examine whether the representation of an item's…

Manual responses can be primed by viewing an image of a hand. The left-right identity of the viewed hand reflexively facilitates responses of the hand that corresponds to the identity. Previous research also suggests that when the response activation is triggered by an arrow, which is backward-masked and presented briefly, the activation manifests…

Various phenomena in tachistoscopic word identification and priming (WRODS and LTRS are confused with and prime WORDS and LETTERS) suggest that position-specific channels are not used in the processing of letters in words. Previous approaches to this issue have sought alternative matching rules because they have assumed that these phenomena reveal…

In a long-lag morphological priming experiment, Dutch (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures and read aloud words. A design using non-switch blocks, consisting solely of Dutch stimuli, and switch-blocks, consisting of Dutch primes and targets with intervening English trials, was administered. Target picture naming was facilitated…

In the Stroop task, participants name the color of the ink that a color word is written in and ignore the meaning of the word. Naming the color of an incongruent color word (e.g., RED printed in blue) is slower than naming the color of a congruent color word (e.g., RED printed in red). This robust effect is known as the Stroop effect and it…

Object images are identified more efficiently after prior exposure. Here, the authors investigated shape representations supporting object priming. The dependent measure in all experiments was the minimum exposure duration required to correctly identify an object image in a rapid serial visual presentation stream. Priming was defined as the change…

The authors provide evidence that long-term memory encoding can occur for briefly viewed objects in a rapid serial visual presentation list, contrary to claims that the brief presentation and quick succession of objects prevent encoding by disrupting a memory consolidation process that requires hundreds of milliseconds of uninterrupted processing.…

This paper examined conceptual versus perceptual priming in identification of incomplete pictures by using a short-term priming paradigm, in which information that may be useful in identifying a fragmented target is presented just prior to the target's presentation. The target was a picture that slowly and continuously became complete and the…