The influence of semantic relatedness on the subliminal processing of words and pictures. A masked priming paradigm study

JORGE MARIO ANDREAU; NICOLÁS MARCELO BRUNO; SANTIAGO TORRES BATÁN; MARIANO DÍAZ RIVERA

San Diego, California, EEUU

Congreso; Neuroscience Meeting; 2018

Society for Neuroscience

Research with masked priming paradigm has shown the presence of unconscioussemantic processing of words and pictures. In this paradigm, the masked priming effect consists in the subliminal processing of a cue stimulus (prime) at a semantic level, which in turn, accelerates the conscious recognition of a subsequent stimulus (target). The behavioral correlate of this semantic masked priming effect is a decrease of the RT in a categorization task (e.g.,recognizing animals vs tools), when the prime is semantically related to the target (e.g., the pair cat-dog). Previous studies suggested that the speed of subliminal semantic processing is stimulus dependent, being faster for pictures as compared to words. Moreover, it has been hypothesisedthat the semantic relatedness of pictorial stimulus would lead to a stronger priming effect as compared to words. The present study, therefore, tested the semantic masked priming effect between words and pictures and also analyzed the semantic relatedness between the prime-targetpair for each stimuli format. Participants performed a masked priming task with words or pictures as prime-target stimuli pairs. They were instructed to perform a semantic categorization task, deciding whether the target stimulus was an animal or an object. Trials consisted of three different conditions for each stimulus format: strongly-related (SR), weakly-related (WR) andnon-related (NR). The first two correspondings to the congruent condition (CC) and the last one belonging to the incongruent condition (IC). We found significant differences in RT between CC vs IC, for both pictures and words, being the responses faster for pictures over words suggesting a difference in the speed of information processing. Nevertheless, contrary to what the literature predicted, no interaction were found between the presentation format (pictures/words) and the semantic relatedness. This could suggest that even though semantic processing are faster for pictures, this doesn´t mean a stronger priming effect. These results are important in the context of recent theories regarding subliminal semantic processing and should be acknowledge in futuresemantic masked priming research.