Variability of the boundaries of semantic priming: the role of informativeness of primes

The study was aimed to identify which account, inhibition or episodic retrieval, is more relevant for newly learned semantic pairs. At the learning stage, 34 participants were presented with nonwords matched with images of unknown fruits as semantic referents. At the testing stage, we used a semantic priming paradigm with a color identification task, where in 50% of cases, images of fruits were targets and their names (pseudowords) were primes, and in the other 50%, vice versa, the names were used as targets and the images as primes. The congruence of the primes (whether the images and their learned names matched each other) was also varied. In parallel, oculomotor activity was recorded. We found positive priming for image primes in the congruent condition and negative priming for word primes regardless of their congruence. The results did not allow us to make a choice in favor of one of the accounts, however, by revealing the expansion of the negative priming effect boundaries, they did demonstrate the ability of the cognitive system to flexibly switch between more general and more specific levels of processing depending on the characteristics of the stimuli.