RETROSPECTIVE PRIMING AND MASKED SEMANTIC PRIMING - THE INTERFERING EFFECTS OF PRIME ACTIVATION

This paper presents three experiments that examine the relationship between retrospective priming and masked semantic priming. Using the pre-cueing paradigm (Hirshman and Durante, 1992), retrospective priming was varied by manipulating prime presentation duration, prior exposure to the primes, and prime-target SOA. All three experiments provided support for the hypothesis that masked semantic printing decreases as retrospective priming increases. We present an account of these findings which focus on the idea that prime activation can interfere with target processing. This account highlights that the failure to fully represent the processing interactions of sequentially presented items constitutes an important gap in contemporary models of semantic priming. © 1994 Academic Press, Inc.