Priming effects in attentional gating.

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effects of amount of prior target information (Experiment 1) and semantic priming (Experiment 2) in an attentional gating task. The goal was to determine some causes of the processing deficits commonly observed in perceiving successive visual stimuli. Items in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream are subject to processing deficits before they are processed to the level of recognition (early selection) and after they have been recognized (late selection). Deficits in the former case presumably are due to an early filter that prevents complete recognition and semantic analysis, whereas deficits in the latter case arise from interference or response competition, producing forgetting among a set of recognized items. The semantic-priming effects found between a cue and a target (Experiment 2) and between two successive targets (Experiment 3) indicate that top-down processes can increase the subjective availability of related items. The results are consistent with the idea that most processing deficits observed in search through an RSVP sequence are due to limited capacity in our ability to form episodic representations of all the items in the sequence.