Does rotation eliminate masked priming effects for Japanese kanji words?

A key issue in recent visual word recognition literature is whether text rotation disrupts the early stages of orthographic processing. Previous research found no masked repetition priming effect when primes were rotated ≥90° in alphabetic languages. The present study investigated the impact of text rotation using logographic (two-character Japanese kanji) words. In Experiment 1, we conducted a masked repetition priming lexical decision experiment with upright and 180° rotated primes. The rotated primes produced a significant priming effect, although the effect was smaller than the upright primes. In Experiment 2, we further examined the effectiveness of 180° rotated primes in two different conditions: the whole words were rotated vs. each constituent character was rotated at their own positions. Both prime types produced significant priming effects of similar magnitudes. These findings suggest that orthographic processing is more robust against text rotation in logographic languages than in alphabetic languages.

Induced oscillatory brain responses under virtual reality conditions in the context of repetition priming.

In the human electroencephalogram (EEG), induced oscillatory responses in various frequency bands are regarded as valuable indices to examine the neural mechanisms underlying human memory. While the advent of virtual reality (VR) drives the investigation of mnemonic processing under more lifelike settings, the joint application of VR and EEG methods is still in its infancy (e.g., due to technical limitations impeding the signal acquisition). The objective of the present EEG study was twofold. First, we examined whether the investigation of induced oscillations under VR conditions yields equivalent results compared to standard paradigms. Second, we aimed at obtaining further insights into basic memory-related brain mechanisms in VR. To these ends, we relied on a standard implicit memory design, namely repetition priming, for which the to-be-expected effects are well-documented for conventional studies. Congruently, we replicated a suppression of the evoked potential after stimulus onset. Regarding the induced responses, we observed a modulation of induced alphaband in response to a repeated stimulus. Importantly, our results revealed a repetition-related suppression of the high-frequency induced gammaband response (>30 Hz), indicating the sharpening of a cortical object representation fostering behavioral priming effects. Noteworthy, the analysis of the induced gammaband responses required a number of measures to minimize the influence of external and internal sources of artefacts (i.e., the electrical shielding of the technical equipment and the control for miniature eye movements). In conclusion, joint VR-EEG studies with a particular focus on induced oscillatory responses offer a promising advanced understanding of mnemonic processing under lifelike conditions.

Mechanisms of long-term repetition priming in recognising speech in noise.

Recognition of speech in noise is facilitated when spoken sentences are repeated a few minutes later, but the levels of representation involved in this effect have not been specified. Three experiments tested whether the effect would transfer across modalities and languages. In Experiment 1, participants listened to sets of high- and low-constraint sentences and read other sets in an encoding phase. At test, these sentences and new sentences were presented in noise, and participants attempted to report the final word of each sentence. Recognition was more accurate for repeated than for new sentences in both modalities. Experiment 2 was identical except for the implementation of an articulatory suppression task at encoding to reduce phonological recoding during reading. The cross-modal repetition priming effect persisted but was weaker than when the modality was the same at encoding and test. Experiment 3 showed that the repetition priming effect did not transfer across languages in bilinguals. Taken together, the results indicate that the facilitated recognition of repeated speech is based on a combination of modality-specific processes at the phonological word form level and modality-general processes at the lemma level of lexical representation, but the semantic level of representation is not involved.

Separating the role of perceptual and conceptual fluency on masked word priming using event-related potentials.

Masked word repetition increases "old" responses on an episodic recognition test (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). This effect is commonly attributed to perceptual fluency; that is, unconscious perception of the prime speeds reading of the target and this fluency leads to elevated familiarity. Two experiments directly tested the claim that perceptual fluency is responsible for word priming effects. Experiment 1 held prime-target meaning constant and altered the physical characteristics of match primes (e.g., "RIGHT" primes "RIGHT") by including both lowercase (e.g, "right") and mixed case primes (e.g., "rIgHt"). If word priming effects are due to perceptual fluency, then lowering the perceptual overlap between the prime and target should decrease or eliminate word priming effects. Instead, all three conditions showed robust priming effects in the behavioral and ERP (i.e., N400) measures. Experiment 2 equated the prime-target perceptual features and lowered the conceptual overlap by using orthographically similar nonwords as primes (e.g., "JIGHT" primes "RIGHT"). Removing prime-target conceptual overlap eliminated behavioral evidence of priming and N400 ERP differences correlated with priming. The evidence suggests that word priming effects on episodic recognition memory are more likely a product of conceptual fluency than perceptual fluency.

Repetition Priming Treatment for Anomia: Effects of Single- and Multiple-Exemplar Protocols.

INTRODUCTION: Repetition priming can lead to improved naming ability in people with aphasia, but concerns have arisen from prior research about using only a single picture exemplar for each target. Specifically, it is unclear whether the observed improvements were due to learning simple correspondences between particular words and pictures rather than changes at a deeper level of lexical-semantic processing. In addition, implications for generalization after training with single exemplars were unclear. This study replicated and extended previous work to address these questions. METHOD: Five participants with chronic aphasia participated in this repeated-measures design study, which repeatedly paired words and pictures with no feedback provided. Two participants engaged in a single-exemplar condition, with a single picture exemplar of each target used for every presentation of that target. The remaining three participants engaged in a multiple-exemplar condition, with several different pictures used for each target. Half of these targets used training pictures during naming probes, whereas half did not. RESULTS: Primed items led to greater improvements in naming than items that were practiced but not primed. The data indicate that improvements may extend beyond stimulus-specific correspondences. Maintenance and generalization effects were mixed. CONCLUSIONS: These data provide further support for the efficacy of repetition priming treatment for anomia. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Attentional priming in Go No-Go search tasks.

Go/No-Go responses in visual search yield different estimates of the operation of visual attention than more standard present versus absent tasks. Such minor methodological tweaks have a surprisingly large effect on measures that have, for the last half-century or so, formed the backbone of prominent theories of visual attention. Secondly, priming effects in visual search have a dominating influence on visual search, accounting for effects that have been attributed to top-down guidance in standard theories. Priming effects in visual search have, however, never been investigated for searches involving Go/No-Go present/absent decisions. Here, Go/No-Go tasks were used to assess visual search for an odd-one-out face, defined either by color or facial expression. The Go/No-Go responses for the color-based task were very fast for both present and absent trials and notably, they resulted in negative slopes of RT and set size. Interestingly "Go" responses were even faster for the target absent case. The "Go" responses were, on the other hand, much slower for expression and became higher with increased set-size, particularly for the target-absent response. Priming effects were considerable for the feature search, but for expression, the target absent priming was strong, but did not occur for target present trials, arguing that repetition priming for this search mainly reflects priming of context rather than target features. Overall, the results reinforce the point that Go/No-Go tasks are highly informative for theoretical accounts of visual attention and are shown here to cast a new light on attentional priming.

Expectation adaptation for rare cadences in music: Item order matters in repetition priming.

Humans make predictions about future events in many domains, including when they listen to music. Previous accounts of harmonic expectation in music have emphasised the role of implicit musical knowledge acquired in the long term through the mechanism of statistical learning. However, it is not known whether listeners can adapt their expectations for unusual harmonies in the short term through repetition priming, and whether the extent of any short-term adaptation depends on the unfolding statistical structure of the music. To explore these possibilities, we presented 150 participants with phrases from Bach chorales that ended with a cadence that was either a priori likely or unlikely based on the long-term statistical structure of the corpus of chorales. While holding the 50-50 incidence of likely vs. unlikely cadences constant, we manipulated the order in which these phrases were presented such that the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence changed throughout the experiment. For each phrase, participants provided two judgements: (a) a prospective rating of how confident they were in their expectations for the cadence, and (b) a retrospective rating of how well the presented cadence matched their expectations. While confidence ratings increased over the course of the experiment, the rate of change decreased as the local probability of an unexpected cadence increased. Participants' expectations favoured likely cadences over unlikely cadences on average, but their expectation ratings for unlikely cadences increased at a faster rate over the course of the experiment than for likely cadences, particularly when the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence was high. Thus, despite entrenched long-term statistics about cadences, listeners can indeed adapt to unusual musical harmonies and are sensitive to the local statistical structure of the musical environment. We suggest that this adaptation is an instance of Bayesian belief updating, a domain-general process that accounts for expectation adaptation in multiple domains.

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

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.

Assessing the time course and magnitude of different forms of attentional priming.

Priming of attentional selection involves speeded selection of task-relevant visual search items when search stimuli remain constant between trials. Various paradigms involving different features have been used to study the nature of this priming. The tasks differ greatly in difficulty and the neural mechanisms involved, raising the question of how easily priming on one feature dimension can be used to draw conclusions about priming on another. Here, this was addressed by contrasting time courses and relative sizes of priming effects for the repetition of a lower-level and higher-level feature (color vs. facial expression). Priming was tested in two odd-one-out search tasks, one involving discrimination (experiments 1A and 1B), the other a present/absent judgment (experiments 2A and 2B). The main question was how similar the size and temporal profiles of priming are for the two features. The sizes of the priming effects were very different for color and expression and color priming effects lasted for much longer than expression priming (measured with memory kernel analyses), suggesting that the mechanisms behind the effects differ in their operational principles. Different forms of priming should only be compared with great caution and priming seems to occur at many levels of processing. Priming should be thought of as a general principle of perceptual processing.

Does accentual variation in the pronunciation of French words influence their recognition? It depends on the ear of presentation.

This repetition priming study examined how word accentual variation in French is represented and processed during spoken word recognition. Mismatched primes in the accentual pattern were less effective than matched primes in facilitating target word recognition when the targets were presented in the left ear but not in the right ear. This indicates that in French, the accentual pattern of words influences their recognition when processing is constrained in the right hemisphere. This study pleads in favor of two memory systems, the one retaining words in an abstract format and the other retaining words in their various forms.

Effects of syntactic structure on the processing of lexical repetition during sentence reading.

Previous research has demonstrated that the ease or difficulty of processing complex semantic expressions depends on sentence structure: Processing difficulty emerges when the constituents that create the complex meaning appear in the same clause, whereas difficulty is reduced when the constituents appear in separate clauses. The goal of the current eye-tracking-while-reading experiments was to determine how changes to sentence structure affect the processing of lexical repetition, as this manipulation enabled us to isolate processes involved in word recognition (repetition priming) from those involved in sentence interpretation (felicity of the repetition). When repetition of the target word was felicitous (Experiment 1), we observed robust effects of repetition priming with some evidence that these effects were weaker when repetition occurred within a clause versus across a clause boundary. In contrast, when repetition of the target word was infelicitous (Experiment 2), readers experienced an immediate repetition cost when repetition occurred within a clause, but this cost was eliminated entirely when repetition occurred across clause boundaries. The results have implications for word recognition during reading, processes of semantic integration, and the role of sentence structure in guiding these linguistic representations.

Older adults get masked emotion priming for happy but not angry faces: evidence for a positivity effect in early perceptual processing of emotional signals.

In higher-level cognitive tasks, older compared to younger adults show a bias towards positive emotion information and away from negative information (a positivity effect). It is unclear whether this effect occurs in early perceptual processing. This issue is important for determining if the positivity effect is due to automatic rather than controlled processing. We tested this with older and younger adults on a positive/negative face emotion valence classification task using masked priming. Positive (happy) and negative (angry) face targets were preceded by masked repetition or valence primes with neutral face baselines. In Experiment 1, 30 younger and 30 older adults were tested with 50 ms primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative targets. Older adults showed repetition priming for positive but not negative targets. Neither group showed valence priming. In Experiment 2, 30 older and 29 younger adults were tested with longer duration primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative emotions, and no valence priming. Older adults only showed repetition and valence priming for positive targets. We proposed older adults' lack of angry face priming was due to an early attention orienting strategy favouring happy expressions at the expense of angry ones.

Cross-Modal Somatosensory Repetition Priming and Speech Processing.

BACKGROUND: Motor speech treatment approaches have been applied in both adults with aphasia and apraxia of speech and children with speech-sound disorders. Identifying links between motor speech intervention techniques and the modes of action (MoA) targeted would improve our understanding of how and why motor speech interventions achieve their effects, along with identifying its effective components. The current study focuses on identifying potential MoAs for a specific motor speech intervention technique. OBJECTIVES: We aim to demonstrate that somatosensory inputs can influence lexical processing, thus providing further evidence that linguistic information stored in the brain and accessed as part of speech perception processes encodes information related to speech production. METHODS: In a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm, we examined whether the processing of external somatosensory priming cues was modulated by both word-level (lexical frequency, low- or high-frequency) and speech sound articulatory features. The study participants were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of twenty-three native English speakers who received somatosensory priming stimulation to their oro-facial structures (either to labial corners or under the jaw). The second group consisted of ten native English speakers who participated in a control study where somatosensory priming stimulation was applied to their right or left forehead as a control condition. RESULTS: The results showed significant somatosensory priming effects for the low-frequency words, where the congruent somatosensory condition yielded significantly shorter reaction times and numerically higher phoneme accuracy scores when compared to the incongruent somatosensory condition. Data from the control study did not reveal any systematic priming effects from forehead stimulation (non-speech related site), other than a general (and expected) tendency for longer reaction times with low-frequency words. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide further support for the notion that speech production information is represented in the mental lexicon and can be accessed through exogenous Speech-Language Pathologist driven somatosensory inputs related to place of articulation.

Precise timing of ERK phosphorylation/dephosphorylation determines the outcome of trial repetition during long-term memory formation.

Two-trial learning in Aplysia reveals nonlinear interactions between training trials: A single trial has no effect, but two precisely spaced trials induce long-term memory. Extracellularly regulated kinase (ERK) activity is essential for intertrial interactions, but the mechanism remains unresolved. A combination of immunochemical and optogenetic tools reveals unexpected complexity of ERK signaling during the induction of long-term synaptic facilitation by two spaced pulses of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5HT). Specifically, dual ERK phosphorylation at its activating TxY motif is accompanied by dephosphorylation at the pT position, leading to a buildup of inactive, singly phosphorylated pY-ERK. Phosphorylation and dephosphorylation occur concurrently but scale differently with varying 5HT concentrations, predicting that mixed two-trial protocols involving both "strong" and "weak" 5HT pulses should be sensitive to the precise order and timing of trials. Indeed, long-term synaptic facilitation is induced only when weak pulses precede strong, not vice versa. This may represent a physiological mechanism to prioritize memory of escalating threats.

The Effect of Exercise Intensity on Affective and Repetition Priming in Middle-Aged Adults.

Previous research has shown that physical exercise improves memory. In the present study, we investigated the possible effects of the intensity of physical exercise as a function of the affective valence of words on implicit memory. In the study, 79 young adult volunteers were randomly assigned to perform moderate- (50% VO2max) or high-intensity exercise (80% VO2max) on a stationary bike. Once the required exercise intensity was achieved, participants performed an affective and repetition priming task concurrently with the physical exercise. Both groups showed similar repetition priming. The moderate-intensity exercise group showed affective priming with positive words, while affective priming was not found in the high-intensity exercise group. Facilitation occurred in both groups when a negative target word was preceded by a positive prime word. Our results suggest that the positive effect of physical exercise on memory is modulated by the affective valence of the stimuli. It seems that moderate-intensity exercise is more beneficial for implicit memory than high-intensity exercise.

Is there magnocellular facilitation of early neural processes underlying visual word recognition? Evidence from masked repetition priming with ERPs.

An influential theory in the field of visual object recognition proposes that it is the fast magnocellular (M) system that facilitates neural processing of spatially more fine-grained information rather the slower parvocellular (P) system. While written words can be considered as a special type of visual objects, it is unknown whether magnocellular facilitation also plays a role in reading. We used a masked priming paradigm that has been shown to result in neural facilitation in visual word processing and tested whether these facilitating effects are mediated by the magnocellular system. In two experiments, we manipulated the influence of magnocellular and parvocellular systems on visual processing of a contextually predictable target character by contrasting high versus low spatial frequency and luminance versus color contrast, respectively. In addition, unchanged (normal) primes were included in both experiments as a manipulation check. As expected, unchanged primes elicited typical repetition effects in the N1, N250 and P3 components of the ERP in both experiments. In the experiment manipulating spatial contrast, we obtained repetition effects only for the N1 component for both M- and P-biased primes. In the luminance versus color contrast experiment, repetition effects were found in N1 and N250 for both M- and P- biased primes. Furthermore, no interactions were found between M-vs. P-biased prime types and repetition. Together these results indicate that M- and P- information contributes jointly to early neural processes underlying visual word recognition.

Revisiting variable-foreperiod effects: evaluating the repetition priming account.

A warning signal preceding an imperative stimulus by a certain foreperiod can accelerate responses (foreperiod effect). When foreperiod is varied within a block, the foreperiod effect on reaction time (RT) is modulated by both the current and the prior foreperiods. Using a non-aging foreperiod distribution in a simple-reaction task, Capizzi et al. (Cognition, 134, 39-49, 2015) found equal sequential effects for different foreperiods, which they credited to repetition priming. The multiple-trace theory of Los et al. (Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 1058, 2014) attributes the slope of the foreperiod-RT function to the foreperiod distribution. We conducted three experiments that examined these predicted relations. Experiment 1 tested Capizzi et al.'s prediction in a choice-reaction task and found an increasing foreperiod-RT function but a larger sequential effect at the shorter foreperiod. Experiment 2 used two distinct short foreperiods with the same foreperiod distribution and found a decreasing foreperiod-RT function. By increasing the difference between the foreperiods used in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 yielded a larger sequential effect overall. The experiments provide evidence that, with a non-aging foreperiod distribution, the variable-foreperiod paradigm yields unequal sequential-effect sizes at the different foreperiods, consistent with the multiple-trace theory but contrary to Capizzi et al.'s repetition-priming account. The foreperiod-RT functions are similar to those of the fixed-foreperiod paradigm, which is not predicted by the multiple trace theory.

Distinct deficits of repetition priming following lateral versus anteromedial frontal cortex damage.

Object repetition commonly leads to long-lasting improvements in identification speed and accuracy, a behavioral facilitation referred to as "repetition priming". Neuroimaging and non-invasive electromagnetic stimulation studies have most often implicated the involvement of left lateral frontal cortex in repetition priming, although convergent evidence from neuropsychological studies is lacking. In the current study, we examine the impact of surgical resection for the treatment of epilepsy on the magnitude of repetition priming at relatively short-term (30-60 min delay) and long-term (3 months) delays in 41 patients with varying seizure foci and resection locations. Overall, patients exhibited significant repetition priming at both short-term and long-term delays. However, patients with frontal resections (largely anterior and medial frontal) differed significantly from those with right anterior temporal resections in showing fully intact short-term priming but absent long-term priming. In a comparison set of 10 recovered aphasic patients, patients with left lateral frontal damage exhibited impaired short-term priming relative to other frontal damage locations, suggesting the differential involvement of lateral and anteromedial frontal regions in mediating repetition priming at short-lag and long-lag timescales, respectively.

What happens to our representation of identity as familiar faces age? Evidence from priming and identity aftereffects.

Matching identity in images of unfamiliar faces is error prone, but we can easily recognize highly variable images of familiar faces - even images taken decades apart. Recent theoretical development based on computational modelling can account for how we recognize extremely variable instances of the same identity. We provide complementary behavioural data by examining older adults' representation of older celebrities who were also famous when young. In Experiment 1, participants completed a long-lag repetition priming task in which primes and test stimuli were the same age or different ages. In Experiment 2, participants completed an identity after effects task in which the adapting stimulus was an older or young photograph of one celebrity and the test stimulus was a morph between the adapting identity and a different celebrity; the adapting stimulus was the same age as the test stimulus on some trials (e.g., both old) or a different age (e.g., adapter young, test stimulus old). The magnitude of priming and identity after effects were not influenced by whether the prime and adapting stimulus were the same age or different age as the test face. Collectively, our findings suggest that humans have one common mental representation for a familiar face (e.g., Paul McCartney) that incorporates visual changes across decades, rather than multiple age-specific representations. These findings make novel predictions for state-of-the-art algorithms (e.g., Deep Convolutional Neural Networks).

Does it help to expect distraction? Attentional capture is attenuated by high distractor frequency but not by trial-to-trial predictability.

Salient distractors such as color singletons typically capture attention. Recent studies have shown that probabilistic expectations of color singletons' occurrence-even when their location and features are unpredictable-can eliminate attentional capture. Here we ask whether this effect, referred to as "second-order distractor suppression," (a) could be merely a result of repetition priming, and (b) is also observed when distractor occurrences are predictable within a sequence of trials? Experiment 1 introduces a novel approach for manipulating the frequency of distractor occurrence while controlling for intertrial priming by design, by embedding identical trial sequences in the to-be-compared conditions. We observed no elimination but significant attenuation of capture in the condition with a higher distractor frequency. In Experiments 2 and 3 we investigated the effect of the trial-to-trial predictability of distractor presence. Repeating regular distractor absent/present patterns did not result in attenuated capture compared with a random condition, not even when upcoming distractor presence was cued. Taken together, the results demonstrate that second-order distractor suppression is not merely a result of repetition priming. However, it is not a response to any type of expectation; this nonspecific type of suppression is almost instantly elicited by environments characterized by a high likelihood of distractors but not by distractor presence that can be anticipated on a trial-by-trial basis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).