Lexical Decision in Parkinsons Disease: A Reply to Brown, McDonald, and Spicer (1999)

Abstract

Recent semantic priming investigations in Parkinsons disease (PD) employed variants of Neelys (1977) lexical decision paradigm to dissociate the automatic and attentional aspects of semantic activation (McDonald, Brown, Gorell, 1996; Spicer, Brown, Gorell, 1994). In our earlier review, we claimed that the results of Spicer, McDonald and colleagues normal control participants violated the two-process model of information processing (Posner Snyder, 1975) upon which their experimental paradigm had been based (Arnott Chenery, 1999). We argued that, even at the shortest SOA employed, key design modifications to Neelys original experiments biased the tasks employed by Spicer et al. and McDonald et al. towards being assessments of attention-dependent processes. Accordingly, we contended that experimental procedures did not speak to issues of automaticity and, therefore, Spicer, McDonald and colleagues claims of robust automatic semantic activation in PD must be treated with caution.