Mechanisms of facilitation in primed perceptual identification

We investigated the mechanism that produces priming in perceptual identification. In Experiment 1, subjects studied a series of compound words (e.g., OUTDOOR, SIDELINE); in Experiment 2, subjects studied a series of pictures (photographs) of objects. All subjects later received perceptual identification tests in which old (primed) and new (unprimed) words (Experiment 1) or pictures (Experiment 2) were presented for varying durations and masked. In both experiments, performance for primed and unprimed stimuli was predicted essentially perfectly by a model that assumes that prior exposure to a stimulus results in increased visual information-acquisition rate when it is subsequently encountered. An ancillary purpose of Experiment 1 was to test whether or not priming occurs for recombined words (e.g., OUTLINE); there was no evidence for such priming at any exposure duration.