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Delta plots with negative-going slopes as a potential marker of decreasing response activation in masked semantic priming

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Abstract

Delta plots with negative-going slopes (nDPs) reflect the phenomenon that an RT difference between two conditions is greater for relatively fast than for relatively slow responses. This unusual distributional pattern has predominantly been observed in the spatial Simon task, where it has been interpreted as reflecting the selective inhibition of an automatically activated response. The literature suggesting that a similar fading mechanism influences RTs in masked identity priming inspired us to check an analogous semantic priming paradigm for nDPs. Consistent with the findings in other paradigms, two masked semantic priming experiments revealed stronger priming effects for relatively fast than for relatively slow responses, thus reflecting an nDP. These findings are compatible with the ideas that the activation produced by masked semantic primes decreases over the course of a trial, such as that of irrelevant spatial information and of masked identity primes, and that nDPs are a general signature of within-trial decreases in response activation across different tasks and paradigms.

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Notes

  1. As an alternative DP analysis, we carried out a within-subjects ANOVA on RT with RT Bin and congruency as factors. The decrease of the PCE across bins was reflected in the significant interaction, F(4,60) = 4.75, p = .002 However, in this case the choice of bin number potentially influences the outcome strongly, since the sum of squares for the overall effect is divided by the number of bins (minus one), so the mean square for the interaction tends to decrease as the number of bins increases. With the present data we found that the interaction was also significant when the ANOVA was run with 3 bins, 10 bins, or 20 bins, F(2,30) = 5.14, p = .012, F(9,135) = 3.35, p = .002, F(19,285) = 2.97, p < .001, respectively. Furthermore, the reported t test on the slopes was significant not only with 5 bins but also with 3 bins, 10 bins or 20 bins, t(15) = 2.46, p = .026, t(15) = 2.3, p = .037, t(15) = 2.20, p = .043, respectively.

  2. For DP analysis, we also carried out a three-factor repeated measures ANOVA with SOA, congruency, and RT bin as factors and RT as dependent variable. The main effect of congruency reached significance, F(1,44) = 62.90, p < .001. As one expects, the main effect of bin was highly significant, too, F(4,176) = 664.20, p < .001. Most importantly, the interaction between congruency and bin was highly significant, F(4,176) = 11.17, p < .001, reflecting the expected decrease of the congruency effect across RT bins (averaged across the two SOAs) and thereby replicating the nDP in the data of Ellinghaus (2015). The decrease was significantly steeper for the long SOA compared to the short SOA, as was reflected in the three-way interaction of congruency, bin and SOA, F(4, 176) = 4.63, p = .022.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a research award from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation to Jeff Miller, and we thank Ouwen Liu for assistance in testing experimental participants. We thank Friederike Schlaghecken and Leendert van Maanen for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstraße 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Ruben Ellinghaus

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 90654, New Zealand

    Jeff Miller

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  1. Ruben Ellinghaus
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  2. Jeff Miller
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Correspondence to Ruben Ellinghaus or Jeff Miller.

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Ellinghaus, R., Miller, J. Delta plots with negative-going slopes as a potential marker of decreasing response activation in masked semantic priming. Psychological Research 82, 590–599 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0844-z

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