Primacy of functional knowledge in semantic representations: The case of living and nonliving things

Abstract

In 3 experiments, participants decided whether sensory and functional features were true of living and nonliving concepts. In Experiments 1 and 2, concepts were presented twice: test phase followed study phase after either 3 min (Experiment 1) or 3 s (Experiment 2). At test, concepts were paired with the same feature as that at study, or a different feature from either the same modality (within-modality priming) or another modality (cross-modality priming). In both experiments functional decisions were faster than sensory decisions for living and nonliving concepts. Whilst no semantic priming occurred between study and test in Experiment 1, the shorter study–test interval of Experiment 2 did lead to test phase semantic priming. Here there was greater within- than cross-modality priming for sensory decisions, but equivalent within- and cross-modality priming for functional decisions owing to significantly greater facilitation of functional decisions from prior sensory decisions than vice versa. Experiment 3 involved a single verification phase: For half the participants the feature name preceded the concept name, and for half the concept name preceded the feature name. The functional processing advantage persisted irrespective of presentation order. Results suggest that functional information is central to the representation of all concepts: Function is processed faster than sensory information and is activated obligatorily.

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article was funded by a studentship awarded to Fiona G. Phelps by the School of Psychology, Cardiff University. Chris Barry is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Essex.

Notes

¹ Whilst the semantic relatedness rating scale ran from 1 (strongly related) through to 7 (weakly related), participants tended not to allocate extreme values of 7 for the true feature–concept pairings; hence, division of stimuli in Experiment 3 as either strongly or weakly related used a mean relatedness value of 3 as the weak–strong boundary.