| Description |
There are conflicting findings in the literature regarding the impact of effortful task demands on the availability of automatic semantic priming processes. Woltz and colleagues reported in one experiment that semantic priming effects were eliminated when episodic retrieval demands were added to a sentence completion priming task. This result could reflect sensitivity of automatic priming to effortful processing in general, or it could reflect the impact of changing task set or processing goals. The current experiment tested the general effort explanation in the same sentence completion. A mixed-case manipulation was used to increase attention demands in some target trials. This presumably disrupted the automatic reading process but did not change the processing goals demanded by the task. Response time was slower in the mixed case trials; however, semantic priming was not impacted by the perceptual effort manipulation. This evidence, in combination with previous findings, suggests that automatic priming processes can facilitate performance even under some forms of effortful task demands, and that disruption of priming may depend on the addition of different task goals. |
