Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) were compared with age-matched control subjects on an associative recognition task. Subjects studied pairs of unrelated words and were later asked to distinguish between these same studied pairs (intact) and new pairs that contained either rearranged studied words (rearranged) or non-studied words (non-studied). Studied pairs were presented either onc...

Words are longer when they are mentioned for the first time within a discourse and shorter in subsequent mentions. This Repetition Effect is usually attributed to the fact that, with repetition, the word becomes more accessible to either the speaker or the listener. In the present paper, we argue that the Repetition Effect is better seen as lengthening of words that are mentioned for the first ...

An experiment is reported that addresses semantic priming effects, lexical repetition effects, and the influence of context on meaning selection for ambiguous words in 32 healthy aged individuals and 32 individuals with Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (SDAT). On each of 232 trials, subjects pronounced each of three words. The four major conditions were concordant (music-organ-piano), disc...

Expert readers exhibit a remarkable ability to recognize handwriting, in spite of enormous variability in character shape-a competence whose cerebral underpinnings are unknown. Subliminal priming, combined with neuroimaging, can reveal which brain areas automatically compute an invariant representation of visual stimuli. Here, we used behavioral and fMRI priming to study the areas involved in i...

Three experiments are described which use RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) to demonstrate a new cognitive phenomenon called “repetition blindness”. Subjects have difficulty detecting repeated words-even when the two occurrences are nonconsecutive and differ in case (Experiment 1). In immediate verbatim recall of sentences (Experiment 2), subjects selectively omitted second instances of r...

The relationships between repetition- and form-priming effects and neighborhood density were analyzed in two masked priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Given that form-priming effects appear to be influenced by a word's orthographic neighborhood, it is theoretically important to find out whether repetition priming also differs as a function of the word's orthographic neighborhoo...