THE SIMON THEN GARFUNKEL EFFECT - SEMANTIC PRIMING, SENSITIVITY, AND THE MODULARITY OF FACE RECOGNITION

The central claim of Fodor’s (1983, 1985) modularity thesis is that perceptual input analyzers are encapsulated from central knowledge and expectancies. In the five experiments reported here we investigated the mechanisms of semantic priming in face recognition, with a view to assessing the plausibility of the modularity claim in that domain. We addressed three questions: Does semantic priming affect sensitivity? Does sensitivity Change when priming cannot be mediated by direct associative links within the face module? And are these sensitivity changes genuine perceptual effects? Semantic priming affected sensitivity for famous/nonfamous discriminations about target faces in all five experiments. Sensitivity was affected by cross-module priming (names primed face targets), which cannot be mediated by direct associative links within the face module (Experiments 3-5). Semantic priming interacted with target distinctiveness (Experiments 3 and 4) and sensitivity changes occurred for briefly presented, masked targets (Experiments 4 and 5). We argue that these results raise doubts about the encapsulation of the face module. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.