An on-line primed monitoring study was used in an exploration of the nature of semantic memory loss in a patient (P.P.) with semantic dementia who showed a profound semantic impairment on a range of off-line tasks. Priming for pairs of words taken from a common category (e.g., cat-dog, spade-rake, ruby-emerald) was contrasted with that for word pairs from different categories that were related ...

A centre-surround attentional mechanism was proposed by Carr and Dagenbach (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 341-350, 1990) to account for their observations of negative semantic priming from hard-to-perceive primes. Their mechanism cannot account for the observation of negative semantic priming when primes are clearly visible. Three experiments (Ns = 30, ...

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is one of the most promising implicit measures to date, showing high reliability and large effect sizes. The current research tested three potential sources of priming effects in the AMP: affective feelings, semantic concepts, and prepotent motor responses. Ruling out prepotent motor responses as a driving force, priming effects on evaluative and semant...

Semantic priming between items stored and associated in memory underlies contextual recall. Response times to process a given target item are shorter when following presentation of a related prime item than when it is unrelated. The study of priming effects allows investigating the structure of semantic networks as a function of association strength and number of links relating the prime and ta...

Four experiments tested for perceptual priming for written words in a semantic categorization task. Repetition priming was obtained for low-frequency words when unrelated categorizations were performed at study and test (Experiment 1), but it was not orthographically mediated given that written-to-written and spoken-to-written word priming was equivalent (Experiments 2 and 3). Furthermore, no p...

We examined semantic vs. associational influences on word priming in schizophrenia. Tested on three occasions, subjects made speeded lexical decisions to three kinds of prime-word relationships: semantic-only (e.g., Deer-Pony), associated-only (e.g., Bee-Honey), or semantic-and-associated (e.g., Doctor-Nurse). Controls showed greater priming of words related via two relationships (semantic-and-...

In a recent meta-analysis, Lucas (2000) concluded that there is strong evidence of an overall pure semantic priming effect but no evidence of priming based purely on association. In the present review, I critically examine the individual studies claiming evidence of featural and associative relations in semantic memory. The most important conclusion is that automatic priming appears to be due t...

Norepinephrine and dopamine are both believed to affect signal-to-noise in the cerebral cortex. Dopaminergic agents appear to modulate semantic networks during indirect semantic priming, but do not appear to affect problem solving dependent on access to semantic networks. Noradrenergic agents, though, do affect semantic network dependent problem solving. We wished to examine whether noradrenerg...