The masked repetition priming effect dissipates when increasing the inter-stimulus interval: Evidence from word naming

We report a word naming experiment that investigated the life duration of the masked repetition priming effect for high- and low-frequency words across a range of five inter-stimulus intervals (0, 50, 150, 500 and 1000 ms). The results clearly demonstrate that the masked repetition priming effect is a very short-lived phenomenon since, while it remains robust for ISIs up to and including 150 ms, it dissipates with ISIs of 500 ms and 1000 ms. Moreover, we replicated the classical additive effect of target frequency and masked repetition priming. These results are discussed in relation to different explanations of masked repetition priming effects in visual word recognition.