A prospective view of the impact of prime validity on response speed and selection in the arrow classification task with free choice trials

Abstract

Bodner and Masson (2001, 2003, 2004) demonstrated that masked priming effects in many cognitive tasks become larger when the proportion of related trials increases (prime validity effects). Those authors claimed that these effects are due to participants' recruiting prime information to aid target processing when it is useful to do so (e.g., there are a large number of related trials-the memory recruitment account). Bodner and Mulji (in press) recently reported similar effects in an arrow classification task with free choice trials. In the present research, we examined whether the memory recruitment account can adequately explain prime validity effects in that task. In this experiment, participants classified arrow direction (i.e., left-right) and responded to free choice stimuli (i.e., two-sided arrows that allow either a left or right response) following arrow primes when the prime-target relationship for the arrow target trials was always congruent, always incongruent, or unpredictive. Prime validity effects for the either-way targets emerged with both 77-and 165-msec prime-target intervals. The results in the unpredictive conditions, however, suggest that those effects were due to the impact of automatic response biases initially created by the prime, which participants attempt to suppress when it is advantageous to do so. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.