Visual Antipriming Effect: Evidence from Chinese Character Identification

Repetition priming with no antipriming in picture identification

Previous studies have shown that the processing of a stimulus is facilitated when that stimulus is repeated compared to when it appears the first time, and this phenomenon is called repetition priming (RP). One explanation for RP is that initial processing of a stimulus strengthens connections within the visual representation, enabling subsequent processing of the same stimulus to be more efficient. More recently, it has been reported that presenting an object with features that overlap with those in a subsequent stimulus impairs the latter's processing, and this cost is termed antipriming (AP). AP is said to be the natural antithesis of RP, and it manifests when two objects share component features, thereby having overlapping representations. In two experiments, we investigated RP and AP in a picture naming task. Following previous research, we used a 4-phase paradigm, in which RP and AP were measured, respectively, by an increase or a decrease in performance for repeated or novel stimuli in Phase 4 compared with the baseline performance in Phase 2. We used a fully randomized design in Experiment 1, and a pseudo-randomized design in stimulus selection but a randomized design in presentation location in Experiment 2. We found robust RP in both experiments, but neither experiment showed any evidence of AP. Our results indicate that RP and AP do not always manifest within the same experiment, and that the relationship between these two effects may be more complex than previously understood.

Comparing Repetition Priming Effects in Words and Arithmetic Equations: Robust Priming Regardless of Color or Response Hand Change

Previous studies have shown that stimulus repetition can lead to reliable behavioral improvements. Although this repetition priming (RP) effect has been reported in a number of paradigms using a variety of stimuli including words, objects, and faces, only a few studies have investigated mathematical cognition involving arithmetic computation, and no prior research has directly compared RP effects in a linguistic task with an arithmetic task. In two experiments, we used a within-subjects design to investigate and compare the magnitude of RP, and the effects of changing the color or the response hand for repeated, otherwise identical, stimuli in a word and an arithmetic categorization task. The results show that the magnitude of RP was comparable between the two tasks and that changing the color or the response hand had a negligible effect on priming in either task. These results extended previous findings in mathematical cognition. They also indicate that priming does not vary with stimulus domain. The implications of the results were discussed with reference to both facilitation of component processes and episodic memory retrieval of stimulus-response binding.