| phenomenon | category accessibility in person perception— “Results suggest that category accessibility is a major determinant of the way in which social information is encoded into memory and subsequently used to make judgments.” |
| claim-type | mechanism— “The likelihood that a behavior is encoded in terms of a particular trait category is postulated to be a function of the relative accessibility of that category in memory.” |
| method — evidence | — “To test these hypotheses, subjects first performed a sentence construction task that activated concepts associated with either hostility (Experiment 1) or kindness (Experiment 2).” |
| extends | Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977)— “In so doing, they supplement and extend an earlier study by Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977).” | claim_relations[0] |
| contradicts | the spreading activation approach of Collins & Loftus (1975) as an account of social priming— “It also suggests that an "interference" interpretation of the sort postulated by Wyer and Srull (in press) may be more appropriate for describing the processing of complex social stimulus information than the spreading activation approach that is typically used to account for priming effects (cf. Collins & Loftus, 1975).” | claim_relations[1] |
| sense | THE AMBIGUITY CONDITION, FOR THE FOURTH TIME AND FROM A FOURTH DIRECTION: `the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous.` With higgins1977 (`at least in ambiguous situations`), north1999 (`only when there is an element of UNCERTAINTY`) and money2013 (`a situation that does not leave much room for interpretation`), that is four papers across 1977-2015 and three fields. And here it is not a qualifier in passing: it is one of four summarised findings, and the target behaviours were SELECTED for ambiguity by a separate rating study of 43 subjects before the experiment began— “In addition, the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous” | senses[0] |
| sense | FREQUENCY IS A DOSE, AND THE PAPER SAYS SO AS A GENERAL LAW RATHER THAN A RESULT: `The accessibility of these concepts, and therefore the likelihood that they are subsequently used, increases with the number of times that instances of them have been activated in the past.` Not `in this experiment` - in the past. The claim is that ordinary life is continuously setting accessibility, and the laboratory manipulation is only a controlled instance of something always running. That is a much larger claim than the experiment tests, and it is the one the field inherited— “The accessibility of these concepts, and therefore the likelihood that they are subsequently used, increases with the number of times that instances of them have been activated in the past” | senses[1] |
| sense | THE DECAY IS SLOW AND INCOMPLETE: `although these effects decrease with the time interval between their activation and the acquisition of information to be interpreted or encoded, they are sometimes detectable even after 24 hours.` A priming effect surviving a day, in a corpus whose other records measure the same word in MILLISECONDS - vorberg2003's time courses, Holcomb2005's 40 ms primes, Huang2018's 16 ms exposure. The same term spans six orders of magnitude of persistence, and `sometimes detectable` is the hedge that keeps this one honest— “Moreover, although these effects decrease with the time interval between their activation and the acquisition of information to be interpreted or encoded, they are sometimes detectable even after 24 hours” | senses[2] |
| sense | A GRADIENT USED TO RULE OUT A RIVAL ACCOUNT: the priming generalised to traits related to the primed one only indirectly, but LESS strongly - `The fact that these effects were typically less on judgments of the latter than of the former traits suggests that this generalizability is not simply due to a halo effect produced by exposure to `good` or `bad` concepts on the priming task.` A halo would not respect the distance between traits. The rival is excluded by the SHAPE of the effect rather than by a control condition, which is a cheaper and less common move— “The fact that these effects were typically less on judgments of the latter than of the former traits suggests that this generalizability is not simply due to a halo effect” | senses[3] |
| sense | AND THEY BORROW higgins1977'S MECHANISM EVIDENCE AND MARK THE BORROWING: `However, direct evidence of encoding was not obtained in the present study. ... While similar data were not collected in the present study, the paradigm used is sufficiently similar to suggest tentatively that similar processes were operating.` They lean on Higgins' applicability null - primed traits that were evaluatively toned but INAPPLICABLE had no effect - for the mechanism their own design does not test, name it as a borrowing, and mark the inference tentative in the same paragraph. Both papers are in this corpus and the dependency is now recorded from the borrowing side— “However, direct evidence of encoding was not obtained in the present study. Such evidence is suggested by Higgins et al., who found that only the priming of trait terms that were potentially applicable for describing the target's behavior affected subjects' later characterizations of him. Thus, primed traits that were evaluatively… | senses[4] |
| control | the filler items were held IDENTICAL across conditions, so that only the priming items differed — held — rules out that something else in the sentence-construction task produced the effect— “In Experiment 2, the filler items were identical, but each possible sentence formed from the kind priming items (e.g., "the hug boy kiss") conveyed kindness.” | controls[0] |
| audit | category accessibility —causes→ encoding — Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span says the effect of accessibility on encoding is more pronounced for ambiguous information; the direction is not stated.— “In addition, the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous” | concept_edges[0] |
| effect direction | category accessibility —causes→ encoding — increases— “In addition, the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous”— “the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced” | concept_edges[0] |
| note | category accessibility —causes→ encoding — THE 'WHEN ... AMBIGUOUS' CLAUSE IS INSIDE THE QUOTE AND IT IS HALF THE CLAIM. An edge reading 'accessibility drives encoding' without it states the 1977-79 result as the unconditional version the field later argued about - and this is the fourth paper in the corpus to name that same condition. Weight 0.9: the paper's own summary of its own finding, in its discussion.— “In addition, the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous” | concept_edges[0] |
| weight | category accessibility —causes→ encoding — 0.9— “In addition, the effect of category accessibility on the encoding of behavioral information is much more pronounced when the implications of this information are relatively ambiguous” | concept_edges[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[0] |
| replication | untested |
| limitation | The encoding step assumed to mediate the effect was not directly measured.— “However, direct evidence of encoding was not obtained in the present study.” | limitations[0] |
| limitation | The apparent negative priming effect at 24 hours in Experiment 1 is not trustworthy without replication.— “such a conclusion must be treated very cautiously pending replication.” | limitations[1] |
| limitation | The claim that the same encoding processes operated as in Higgins et al. rests on paradigm similarity, not on data collected here.— “While similar data were not collected in the present study, the paradigm used is sufficiently similar to suggest tentatively that similar processes were operating.” | limitations[2] |
| limitation | Only two trait concepts were studied, so the hostility/kindness asymmetry needs a broader sample.— “This possibility may deserve further investigation using a broader sample of trait concepts than those considered in the present studies.” | limitations[3] |