Positive schizotypal traits have been associated with right hemisphere activation. Previous research has indicated that the left and right hemispheres differ in their processing of semantic ambiguity; specifically, given sufficient time, the left hemisphere primes dominant meanings and inhibits subordinate meanings, and the right hemisphere primes both dominant and subordinate meanings. The aut...

Semantic priming by visually masked, unidentifiable ("subliminal") words occurs robustly when the words appearing as masked primes have been classified earlier in practice as visible targets. It has been argued (Damian, 2001) that practice enables robust subliminal priming by automatizing learned associations between words and the specific motor responses used to classify them. Two experiments ...

In a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on the French part of the Dundee corpus, the time spent inspecting a target word in a given sentence was found to depend on its degree of semantic relatedness (as assessed in the LSA framework) to two content words belonging to a prior part of the sentence, and located at varying distances to the left of the target. However, only verb primes...

Three experiments tested whether counterfactual events can serve as primes. The evidence supports the hypothesis that counterfactuals prime a mental simulation mind-set that leads people to consider alternatives. Exposure to counterfactual sce narios affected person perception judgments in a later, unrelated task and this effect was distinct from semantic construct priming. Moreover, these effe...

In 4 experiments, the authors found evidence for negatively signed masked semantic priming effects (with category names as primes and exemplars as targets) using a new technique of presenting the masked primes. By rapidly interchanging prime and mask during the stimulus onset asynchrony, they increased the total prime exposure to a level comparable with that of a typical visible prime condition...

Two experiments investigated age differences in how semantic, syntactic, and orthographic factors influence the production of homophone spelling errors in sentence contexts. Younger and older adults typed auditorily presented sentences containing homophone targets (e.g., blew) that were categorized as having a regular spelling (EW) or an irregular spelling (UE). In Experiment 1, homophones were...

In two ERP experiments, we examined whether active inhibition is involved in intentional forgetting. Both experiments consisted of a nondirected-forgetting (nDF) and a directed-forgetting (DF) block. Participants were sequentially presented with a prime, an R/F (remember/forget) cue, and a target. Participants made lexical decisions to both the primes and targets (Experiment 1) or only to the t...

Disambiguation of heterophonic and homophonic homographs was investigated in Hebrew using semantic priming. Ambiguous primes were followed by unambiguous targets at 100 ms, 250 ms, and 750 ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Lexical decision for targets related to the dominant phonological alternatives of heterophonic homographs were facilitated at all SOAs. Targets related to subordinate alter...

We used event-related fMRI (ER-fMRI) to test the hypothesis that metaphors bias cognitive processing of semantic relatedness towards a search for a wider range of associations. Twelve right-handed male volunteers read a mixture of metaphoric and literal sentences, each sentence being followed by a single word, which could be semantically related or not to the preceding sentence context. We foun...

The present study investigated whether semantic negative priming from single prime words depends on the availability of cognitive control resources. Participants with high vs. low working memory capacity (as assessed by their performance in complex span and attentional control tasks) were instructed to either attend to or ignore a briefly presented single prime word that was followed by either ...