Semantic Priming and Retrieval from Lexical Memory: Roles of Inhibitionless Spreading Activation and Limited-Capacity Attention

Semantic Priming and Retrieval from Lexical Memory: Roles of Inhibitionless Spreading Activation and Limited-Capacity Attention James H. Neely

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Semantic Priming and Retrieval from Lexical Memory: Roles of Inhibitionless Spreading Activation and Limited-Capacity Attention 1977 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 10.1037/0096-3445.106.3.226 neely1977-semantic-priming neely1977-semantic-priming.txt, the project's staged copy 70285e82fc25263d8708992770c56e902a3313b6 personal-copy cognitive-psychology

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them mechanism Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. semantic priming in lexical decision Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Whether the inhibition in the Unexpected conditions is due solely to a semantic-matching strategy remains unresolved because of contrary evidence at the 700-msec SOA. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The claimed asymmetry in buildup of conscious-attention facilitation versus inhibition may be only a failure to detect an effect. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The data cannot adequately answer in what sense activation is 'spreading' if high- and low-dominance exemplars are facilitated equally. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the stimulus onset asynchrony held constant at 2,000 msec for every trial in the 2,000-alone group eliminates: the SOA varying within the group, which would confound the expectancy manipulation with the time available to form the expectancy · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. spreading activation spreading activation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. lexical decision lexical decision Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. automatic spreading activation automatic spreading activation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. conscious attention conscious attention Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. inhibition inhibition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. facilitation facilitation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. logogen logogen Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. expectancy expectancy Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE PAPER'S MOVE IS TO MAKE THE CONFOUND INTO THE DESIGN. Earlier work could not say how much facilitation came from attention and how much from automatic spreading, because relatedness and expectancy travel together: a prime that is related to the target is also a prime that makes it expected. Neely breaks them apart - `the presence or absence of automatic spreading activation was controlled by whether the prime and the target were semantically related`, while conscious attention `was controlled by variations in the PROBABILITY that the priming cue itself would appear`. Two knobs where the field had one Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND THE CELL THAT PAYS FOR IT IS BODY-heart: A SIGN REVERSAL PRODUCED BY NOTHING BUT DELAY. The prime is semantically related to the target, but the subject expects a different category - so automatic activation says facilitate and conscious attention says inhibit, in the same trial. `there was an inhibition effect at the 2,000 msec SOA, which decreased as the SOA decreased until, at the 250-msec SOA, it became a facilitation effect.` Not a difference in size between conditions - the same condition changing sign as the slow mechanism is given less time to act. That is as close to a crossing double dissociation as a priming experiment gets Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE ASYMMETRY THAT MAKES THE INFERENCE WORK, STATED AS A PROPERTY RATHER THAN A RESULT: `Quotation withheld.` Both mechanisms facilitate; only one inhibits. So facilitation is evidence of nothing in particular and inhibition is evidence of attention - which is why the whole design is built to produce inhibition and why the 250-msec SOA, where inhibition vanishes, is the control rather than a null result Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND IT IS THE FIFTH RECORD RUNNING WHERE THE INSTRUMENT IS PART OF THE PHENOMENON - BUT THE FIRST WHERE THE AUTHOR KNEW. Finkbeiner2011: task difficulty decides what counts as subliminal. erb2019: associative overlap decides whether a CSE is control. eckstein2007: which awareness test decides whether the prime was seen. lukatela2007: within- vs between-subjects decides whether the lexicons look separate. Here SOA decides WHICH OF TWO MECHANISMS you are measuring - and Neely makes that the independent variable instead of discovering it afterwards. The corpus now holds the 1977 paper that turned the artefact into the design, and the 2007 paper that found the same class of artefact still undetected in its own neighbouring literature. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND THE MECHANISM CLAIM IS SHARPER THAN `ATTENTION SLOWS THINGS DOWN`: `the conscious-attention mechanism does not inhibit the buildup of activation in unattended logogens but rather inhibits the readout of information from unattended logogens.` The activation still accumulates; what attention withholds is access to it. That is a falsifiable division of labour - it predicts an unattended item can be primed without being reportable, which is the exact question Finkbeiner2011, eckstein2007 and hesselmann2016 are still arguing about thirty to forty years later, and none of the three cites this sentence for it Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Posner and Snyder (1975a) two-factor theory of attention Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → Neely (1976) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → Rosch (1975) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. conscious attention —causes→ expectancy conscious attention expectancy direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · direction on the measure (stated by the tagger, no quotation): increases · note: THE PHRASE THAT CARRIES THE EDGE IS A FOUR-WORD ASIDE: 'the expectancy generated…'. Not a sentence about how expectancies arise - a subordinate clause inside a sentence about semantic matching. An earlier note of ours says the sentence carrying the mechanism usually cannot carry the edge; here the edge is carried by a parenthetical inside a sentence that is about something else entirely. Weight 0.9: the relation is asserted rather than argued, and it is asserted while the author is busy with a different claim. The same sentence cites Collins & Loftus 1975, which this corpus merged four hours ago - the spreading-activation paper whose mechanism Neely is here separating from attention. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its span and kept, but the span says the expectancy is generated via conscious attention; the sign 'increases' is not stated. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. facilitation —contrasted-with→ inhibition facilitation inhibition strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: THE DISSOCIATION IN ONE SENTENCE, AND IT IS THE PAPER'S WHOLE ARGUMENT. 'facilitation occurred automatically…'. Regardless / only - the two quantifiers are what turn a pair of effects into a pair of mechanisms. Weight 0.95: this is a result sentence, it names both endpoints, and the contrast it draws is the one the whole design was built to make. Rare on two counts - says the sentence carrying the mechanism usually cannot carry the edge, and it carried both here; and it is the first edge today whose evidence needed no trimming at all. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. automatic spreading activation —causes→ facilitation automatic spreading activation facilitation direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · direction on the measure (stated by the tagger, no quotation): increases · note: BOTH MECHANISMS FACILITATE, AND THE QUOTE IS COMPARING THEIR SIZES. That is worth keeping rather than flattening: the edge is real - automatic spreading activation produces facilitation - but the sentence exists to say that its facilitation is 'slightly greater' than the attentional kind. Weight 0.9 rather than 0.95 because the claim is made inside an 'assuming that' - Neely is deriving what would have to be true for an observed pattern, not reporting a measurement. The hedge is in the quote and I have not cut it out. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span says the effect CAN BE ACCOUNTED FOR by assuming this; hedged. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a related/expected prime facilitates lexical decision on the target about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. an unexpected prime can inhibit target recognition (attentional cost) about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. The quote was later moved from the title block to the summary sentence that reports the inhibition effect. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ANOVA ANOVA about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. degrees-of-freedom degrees-of-freedom Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. p-value p-value about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. statistical-significance statistical-significance about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. variance variance about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

The full text of this article is not redistributable, so it is not included here. The evidence sentences are withheld with it; the tag layer and its grounding status remain. The article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.106.3.226.