Category priming with aliens: Analysing the influence of targets' prototypicality on the centre surround inhibition mechanism

Abstract

Marginally perceptible prototypes as primes lead to slowed reactions to related category exemplars as compared to unrelated ones. This at first glance counterintuitive finding has been interpreted as evidence for a particular mechanism of lateral inhibition, namely the centre surround inhibition mechanism. We investigated the semantic surround of category labels by experimentally manipulating the prototypicality of stimuli. Participants first learned two new categories of fantasy creatures in a 5-day-long learning phase before they worked through a semantic priming task with the category prototypes as primes and category exemplars as targets. For high-prototypical targets we observed benefit effects from related primes, whereas for low-prototypical targets we observed cost effects. The results define when the centre surround inhibition mechanism is applied, and furthermore might explain why previous studies with word stimuli (i.e., material that prevents experimental manipulation of prototypicality) observed mixed results concerning the prototypicality of targets.

Keywords:

• Semantic priming
• Centre surround inhibition
• Prototypicality

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article was supported by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Dirk Wentura and Christian Frings (WE 2284/5-2).

Notes

¹There are also models that explain this phenomenon by assuming that processing of the combined prime–target episode causes semantic priming. In particular, compound-cue models (e.g., Dosher & Rosedale, 1989; Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988) assume that the target and elements of the context (including the prime) provide a retrieval cue to memory; the familiarity of a cue (containing target and prime) is higher for related than unrelated pairs and hence reactions to related targets are faster. Moreover, it should be noted that there are further explanations of semantic priming in terms of strategic processes (e.g., in terms of expectancy-based priming; Becker, 1980). However, we will constrain our discussion to models that rest on non-strategic processes (see, e.g., McNamara, 2005).