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Temporal expectations mediated the repetition effect in a sequence in two ways

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Abstract

The repetition priming effect generally refers to facilitated responding in instances where the same stimulus or a very similar stimulus repeats after an initial occurrence. Prior studies showed that the repetition priming effect was greater when repetitive stimuli appeared at expected times than when they appeared at less expected times. However, in addition to the expectation for repetition, the expectation for nonrepetitive stimuli may also arise in a sequence, especially after repetitive stimuli continuously appeared several times. This study was designed to further reveal how these two kinds of expectations influence the repetition effect in a sequence. Participants were asked to solve 3, 4 or 5 repetitive tasks followed by a novel task in the experimental group, a situation where the expectations for repetitive events arise in the first three serial positions but that for nonrepetitive events arise in the fourth, fifth and sixth serial positions, or were asked to continuously solve 3–5 repetitive tasks in the control group, a situation where only the expectation for repetitive events appears. The results showed that the repetition effect appeared steadily in the whole sequence for the control group, whereas the repetition effect appeared in the early serial positions but was reduced in the later serial position for the experimental group. The findings revealed the dual influences of temporal expectations on repetition effects in a sequence.

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Availability of data

The data and materials for experiment are available at https://osf.io/6hfxd/.

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Funding

This work was supported by funding programs from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31700956, 32060194); the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 2018M632598 and 2018T110657); the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi, China (Grant No. 20181BAB214010); and the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of Jiangxi, China (Grant No. 2018KY28).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, 330022, China

    Haiqiong Yan, Shuang Tang & Furong Huang

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  1. Haiqiong Yan
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  2. Shuang Tang
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  3. Furong Huang
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Contributions

HY: Investigation; Methodology; Formal analysis; Writing – original draft. ST: Formal analysis; Software; Writing – original draft. FH: Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Project administration; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing.

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Correspondence to Furong Huang.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants followed the principles of the 1964 Helsinki declaration and were approved by the Research Project Ethical Review Committee at Jiangxi Normal University of China.

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Editors: Daniele Nardi (Ball State University), Franco Delogu (Lawrence Technological University); Reviewers: Fernando Luna (Universidad Nacional de Cordoba), Cengiz Acarturk (Jagiellonian University).

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Yan, H., Tang, S. & Huang, F. Temporal expectations mediated the repetition effect in a sequence in two ways. Cogn Process 24, 463–469 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-023-01141-5

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