ABSTRACT
Given that semantic priming occurs even when primes are presented so briefly that subjects claim to see nothing, one might predict that semantic priming would occur regardless of the task performed on the prime. In fact, this is not true. Henik, Friedrich, and Kellogg (1983) and Smith, Theodor, and Franklin (1983) discovered that semantic priming in lexical decision was greatly reduced if subjects searched the prime for a given letter. Semantic priming is also reduced in magnitude when the prime is searched for a repeated letter (e.g., Smith, Meiran, & Besner, 2000) or when the area surrounding the prime is searched for a visual probe (e.g., Smith, Theodor, & Franklin, 1983).1 These findings are surprising when one considers that semantic priming is consistently found when the prime word requires no response (e.g., Neely, 1977), is named (e.g., Henik, Friedrich, & Kellogg, 1983), is classified as a word or a nonword (e.g., Tweedy, Lapinski, & Schvaneveldt, 1977), or is the object of a semantic decision of some kind (e.g., living vs. nonliving; Smith, Theodor, & Franklin, 1983). Similar prime-task effects also occur for Stroop interference (e.g., Parkin, 1979).
