The Effect of Target Repetition on Semantic Priming in a Three-Target RSVP Task

This study used a rapid serial visual presentation task to examine the impact of target relatedness on report accuracy. In this task participants were shown a series of briefly presented words and were required to identify the three colored target words from the stream of distractor words. In two experiments participants either recalled the three targets words from memory at the end of each trial or recognized the targets from a list of all possible targets. The first target shown on each trial was unrelated to the second or third target. The second and third targets within each stream were semantically related (e.g., dog and cat) on half the trials and unrelated on the other half the trials (e.g., table and cat). The effect of the second and third targets sharing a relationship was examined for Target 3 accuracy. Target 3 accuracy was greater if it was preceded by a related Target 2, compared to when Targets 2 and 3 were unrelated. This shows a semantic priming effect (facilitation effect) for Target 3 accuracy, when the both Target 2 and 3 were identified. In contrast, when Target 2 was missed or incorrectly reported there was no difference in accuracy for related or unrelated target contexts (no priming or facilitation effect for Target 3). These semantic priming effects were evident in the recall and recognition tasks in Experiment 1 and 2. This study shows that a target presented during a rapid serial visual presentation task must be consciously processed to facilitate the report of a subsequently presented target word.