Return to search

Mechanisms of Masked Priming: Testing the Entry Opening Model

Since it was introduced in Forster and Davis (1984), masked priming has been widely adopted in the psycholinguistic research on visual word recognition, but there has been little consensus on its actual mechanisms, i.e. how it occurs and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation addresses two different interpretations of masked priming, one based on the Interactive Activation Model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), in which priming is seen as a result of persisting activation from the prime, the other based on the Entry Opening Model (Forster & Davis, 1984), which sees priming as a savings effect. Five experiments are reported testing contrasting hypotheses about the role of prime duration and prime-target asynchrony (SOA) in masked priming using both identity and form priming. Overall, this dissertation lends support to the Entry Opening Model, demonstrating that masked priming is essentially a savings effect, and that as such, it is determined by the SOA, not the prime duration per se.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/228453
Date January 2012
CreatorsWu, Hongmei
ContributorsForster, Kenneth I., Nicol, Janet, Waugh, Linda, Forster, Kenneth I.
PublisherThe University of Arizona.
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Electronic Dissertation
RightsCopyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Page generated in 0.0021 seconds