Unconscious Semantic Priming Influences Performance of Visuomotor Tasks Differently but the Effects are Similar in Young and Older Adults

Abstract

We examined the effects of semantic priming of attention on two sequentially presented visuomotor tasks, traffic judgments and saccadic adaptation. Priming was accomplished with the scrambled sentence task: participants formed meaningful sentences from a list of words where a word denoting wide attention focus was involved. The results showed that semantic priming influenced positively saccade adaptation (its’ benefit increased) while it attenuated visuomotor performance in the traffic task (RT of hand movements increased). We found the effects of priming on both tasks’ performance to be comparable in young and older participants. It was suggested that semantic priming effect on visuomotor tasks depended on the cognitive resources which were needful as for the priming as for the primed task.

Keywords:

• saccade adaptation
• cognitive resources
• space attention focus
• aging

Notes

1 We decided to use a constant interstep interval of 200 ms rather than a saccade-triggered interval to remain consistent with a recent study (Bock et al., 2017). Moreover, speed and magnitude of adaptation, as well as the magnitude of aftereffects, were all found comparable for constant and for saccade-triggered intervals (Grigorova et al., 2010).