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Direction of association between targets in a RSVP task influences priming at very short but not long SOAs

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Abstract

When two targets are presented using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and the interval between the targets is 200–500 ms, detection or identification of the second target is impaired. This impairment in second target report is known as the attentional blink (AB). This study sought to examine the impact of the direction of target association on priming during an AB task using very short and long SOAs. Two experiments were conducted using dual-stream RSVP tasks and targets that either shared an associative relationship or were unrelated to one another. The direction of association between the targets was also varied so that associatively related targets were presented in the forward (strongest association from target 1 to target 2) or backward directions of association (strongest association from target 2 to target 1). In Experiment 1 very short SOAs between targets (27–213 ms) were used. Priming was evident at the same SOAs for both targets presented in the backward direction of association. However, for targets presented in the forward direction of association, priming occurred for target 1 and target 2 at different SOAs. Experiment 2 used longer SOAs between targets (107 to 535 ms) and it was determined that while direction of association between the targets did not affect priming, there was a larger priming effect for target 2 than for target 1. The results of the two experiments indicate that direction of association between targets influences priming in RSVP tasks that use very short but not long SOAs. The results are discussed in relation to the two-stage response competition model of Potter et al. (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 28:1149–1162, 2002).

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Notes

  1. While there are various ways in which priming may be defined within an AB task (e.g. N400 differences), one frequently used index of priming is the reduction in the magnitude of the AB when T2 follows a related T1 compared to when the two targets are unrelated. This is the definition of priming that will be used within the current study.

  2. While selection of a stimulus set matched on associative strength in both directions would have been ideal, this is not possible when dealing with associated word pairs, which by their nature have a more dominant association in the forward direction.

  3. Although the forward association index for target pairs in this study was marginally lower than that used by Maki et al. (1997) (0.6), this was unavoidable when needing to generate 200 associated word pairs as stimuli and ensure that a word only occurred once within the entire stimulus set. Further, word pairs with this level of association have been shown to produce priming effects in word naming tasks (Murphy 2011). Therefore, this small difference in association index should not affect any priming obtained in the current study.

  4. While it would have been ideal to have the T1 and T2 words matched on word frequency, this would have meant sacrificing the strength of association between the targets and would have further reduced the potential set of targets for use in this experiment.

  5. Priming of a similar magnitude for T1 and T2 presented in the backward direction of association indicates that word frequency differences between targets cannot be the source of these effects. If priming was moderated by target word frequency, then a larger priming effect should have been evident for T2 than for T1 when targets were presented in the backward direction of association. Further as priming was only evident at select SOAs for targets presented in the forward direction of association, this also supports the lack of impact of word frequency on the priming results in this experiment.

  6. It should be noted that due to the way the forward and backward directions of associations were derived, T1 in the forward direction of association and T2 in the backward direction of association were the exact same words and therefore had the exact same word frequency (and other key lexical variables). The same was also true for T1 in the backward and T2 in the forward direction of association. Priming effects for these targets were directly compared to control for the impact of word frequency on these results.

  7. It should be noted that it is also possible that T1 and T2 processing operates in parallel and there is leakage between the processing of two targets. This would also account for the priming effects reported in this study. We thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to our attention.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Professor David Shum, Professor Juan Lupiáñez and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, Behavioural Basis of Health Program, Griffith Health Institute, Gold Coast, Australia

    Milton T. Nyawata & Karen Murphy

  2. School of Applied Psychology, Gold Coast Campus, Griffith University, Gold Coast, 4222, Australia

    Milton T. Nyawata & Karen Murphy

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  1. Milton T. Nyawata
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  2. Karen Murphy
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Correspondence to Karen Murphy.

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Nyawata, M.T., Murphy, K. Direction of association between targets in a RSVP task influences priming at very short but not long SOAs. Cogn Process 14, 1–11 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0528-y

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