Processing facilitation in a lexical decision task.

A cost/benefit and a speed/accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task provided information relevant to the automatic/conscious facilitation distinction made by Neely (1977) and Posner and Snyder (1975b).Information is also provided about the operation of discriminability, criterion bias, and response bias in the facilitation.In both studies, half the cues were neutral and half were words.Word-cues were instances from 30 semantic categories.Word targets were the category names, nonword targets were derived from those names.The cue-word was valid 80% of the time and invalid 20% of the time.In Experiment 1, cue time, a between groups factor, was either 200, 300, 400, 500, or 700 msec.Valid cues produced facilitation in RT at cue times as short as 400 msec.Invalid cues produced inhibition at cue times as short as 200 msec.These results, while similar in many respects to Neely's (1977), raise doubts about an "inhibitionless" kind of automatic facilitation in primed lexical decisions.Response bias and simple applications of criterion bias models are also ruled-out as the sole explanation of the facilitation.Experiment 2 used a response-signal technique to collect information about the speed/accuracy trade-off in a lexical decision task.Six college students participated in 10 sessions each.Cues were always presented for 800 msec, targets were variably presented within subjects for either 100, 200, 300, 450, or 600 msec.Results indicate that: (a) subjects are capable of trading accuracy for speed; (b) invalid cues can lower discriminability; (c) response bias is an active component in priming; (d) previous studies