Words, pictures, and priming: on semantic activation, conscious identification, and the automaticity of information processing.

We investigated the encoding mechanisms involved in the perceptual recognition of words and pictures. Latencies in naming word and picture targets were analyzed as a function of several characteristics of a preceding prime, including whether it was a word or a picture, its duration of exposure, the interval between the prime and target onset, and whether or not the prime was consciously identified and reported by the subject. Results indicated that a common semantic code is available that can represent the meaning of either a word or a picture. This semantic representation, however, appears to be more easily activated by picture primes than by word primes and seems to benefit the naming of picture targets more than the naming of word targets. Despite the advantage for pictures with respect to semantic activation, overall processing in the naming task was slower and more attention demanding for pictures than for words. Comparison of our data with data on classification, in which an opposite pattern occurs (overall processing appears to be slower and more attention demanding for words than for pictures), suggests that, on the average, pictures have faster and more automatic access to their meanings than to their names but that words have faster and more automatic access to their names than to their meanings. This conclusion concerning the relative ability of stimuli to activate different kinds of internal representations has implications for a theory of the basis and development of automaticity.

Early extraction of meaning from pictures and its relation to conscious identification.

Two experiments were conducted in which subjects labeled target pictures preceded by either semantically related or unrelated prime pictures. The exposure duration of each prime was varied around a threshold value, established separately for each subject, that represented the minimum viewing time necessary to identify the prime picture with 100% accuracy. The results of the first study indicated that semantic-priming effects can be obtained with pictures at prime exposure durations too brief for conscious identification of the prime to occur. Data from the second experiment provided an estimate of the minimum exposure time necessary for priming under these conditions. There was evidence from both experiments that attaching a name to a picture is an attended operation that can interfere with naming a subsequent picture, independent of any semantic priming that might occur. This indicates that extracting the meaning from a picture and consciously identifying it may be separate processes. The results are discussed in terms of current models of picture perception.