Frontiers in Psychology (Sep 2015)
Thematic and taxonomic priming effects at different length stimulus onset asynchronies
Abstract
Aims: People conceptually categorise or group objects in various ways. Two category types that have been identified are taxonomic and thematic. Taxonomic refers to grouping of objects with shared features or being of the same kind, e.g., ‘sheep’ and ‘goat’ are grouped together as they belong to the superordinate category animals. Thematic relations refer to objects that are categorised based on an association, e.g., ‘sheep’ and ‘grass’. Priming effects have been shown to occur for both category types. However, taxonomic and thematic priming have been found to have different time courses when stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) is manipulated. Research has found that a taxonomic priming effect was most apparent at 500ms SOA but declined with a longer SOA, whereas thematic priming was more apparent at a longer than shorter SOA duration (Estes & Jones, 2009). The current research aims to investigate in a single study how SOA duration influences taxonomic and thematic priming effects. Method: A lexical decision semantic priming task was administered to 54 participants. There were two SOA conditions; 500ms and 1500ms. Target words were preceded with thematic, taxonomic and a baseline condition. Results: Taxonomic priming was found to have a greater facilitatory effect than thematic priming at 500ms SOA. Facilitatory effects declined for both taxonomic and thematic priming at the longer SOA duration. Conclusions: There was a greater taxonomic priming effect at 500ms than at the longer SOA. However, the temporal pattern for thematic priming did not concur with previous findings. These results will be compared with Malaysian participants, as research has found categorisation differences in Western and Asian participants.
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