ИСТИНА

Unconscious semantic priming is a well known procedure of speeded presentation of a masked prime prior to target (both can be either written/spoken words or pictures semantically related to each other), that affects speed and/or accuracy of semantic categorization, lexical decision or naming task performance relative to baseline, where prime and target are unrelated. The amount of successful publications is impressive so it may seem that you only need a prime, a target and a mask in appropriate sequence to establish reliable priming-effect. On the other hand, you’d also need to set an appropriate timing to get in between objective and subjective thresholds: subject should perceive the prime and in the same time he or she should be unaware of that perception. Conditions vary a lot: you may obtain priming at 17-50 ms prime duration, so at first sight finding subjective threshold has higher priority. There is a type of semantic priming where target represents an exemplar of category used as a prime – category priming (i.e. animal-lion). Due to semantic nature of stimuli used in semantic priming procedure there’re many other variables to control along with timing. In several experiments different categorization tasks and categories, SOAs and masks were tested in attempt to achieve the category priming. They all resulted in failure. Why? Is the effect so fragile or whether the nature of problem is perceptual, but not conceptual? Final prime visibility measure showed that masking was effective and even too effective, so that prime was totally wiped off by the mask and fell below the objective threshold. The results revealed a strong need of new “starting point” procedure to find an appropriate prime/mask durations with least possible costs.