The effect of asymmetrical association on positive and negative semantic priming
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Updated: Sep 26, 2026

A Semantic Priming Event-related Potential (ERP) Task to Study Lexico-semantic and Visuo-semantic Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder
Published on: April 12, 2018
1State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA. khutch@artsci.wustl.edu
Abstract:
One's actively ignoring a stimulus can impair subsequent responding to that stimulus. This negative priming effect has been argued to generalize to semantically related items as well, but the evidence for this is still somewhat weak. This article presents a new experiment in which participants made lexical decisions to asymmetrically associated prime-target pairs presented in either the forward (e.g., stork-baby) or backward (e.g., baby-stork) direction. The critical new finding was that both attended positive and ignored negative semantic priming occurred only for prime-target pairs presented in the forward direction. The results support either (1) a spreading inhibition model in which items associated with an ignored distractor are inhibited during prime selection or (2) a version of episodic retrieval theory in which the prime distractor and items associated with it are tagged as "to-be-ignored" during prime selection.
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