ABSTRACT
Relevant and irrelevant words were exposed for 67, 200, or 500 msec before being backward masked. Awareness of relevant words increased sharply with exposure duration. Physical and semantic levels of perceptual processing were measured in terms of identity priming and semantic priming, respectively. A test word was primed by a replica of itself in the former case and by a semantic associate in the latter case. Relevant prime words surpassed irrelevant prime words on both measures, but this effect was confined to longer exposure durations in the case of semantic priming. Controlled processing was measured in terms of recognition accuracy on a delayed test. Relevant words surpassed irrelevant words on this measure, but only at longer durations of original exposure. The semantic-priming data and recognition data described corresponding patterns, but the identity-priming data described a different pattern. As a composite, the data indicate that perceptual processing and controlled processing are dissociable and that selective processing can begin during perceptual processing.
