Automaticity and Flexibility of S–R Retrieval During Priming
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Peter Walla
Brain Sci. 2017, 7(6), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci7060065
Received: 17 October 2016 / Revised: 12 May 2017 / Accepted: 30 May 2017 / Published: 13 June 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Mechanisms of Memory in the Brain)
Learned associations between stimuli and responses (S–R associations) make important contributions to behavioral and neural priming. The current study investigated the automaticity and flexibility of these S–R associations and whether the global task context in which they occur modulates the impact of S–R retrieval on priming. Participants engaged in a semantic repetition priming task in which S–R retrieval is known to influence priming. Across participants, repetition priming occurred in global task contexts (i.e., combination of activated task sets) that either remained consistent or shifted across time. In the stable context group, the global task context at study matched that at test, whereas in the shifting context group, the global task context at study differed from that at test. Results revealed that the stability of the global task context did not affect the magnitude of S–R contributions to priming and that S–R contributions to priming were significant in both the stable and shifting context groups. These results highlight the robustness of S–R contributions to priming and indicate that S–R associations can flexibly transfer across changes in higher-level task states.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
repetition priming; associative learning; memory; context
▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Tobin, H.; Race, E. Automaticity and Flexibility of S–R Retrieval During Priming. Brain Sci. 2017, 7, 65.
Show more citation formats
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.