Modulation of associative priming effects by age and perceptual ability:
Empirical findings and a computational model
David C. Plaut and James R. Booth
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
College and elementary students were grouped by perceptual ability based on a
pattern-matching pretest. In a lexical decision task, only high-perceptual
students showed the typical finding of greater priming for low- versus
high-frequency words; the other students showed weaker priming that did not
interact with frequency. The results are modeled by a distributed
connectionist network that encodes associative relatedness by word transition
probabilities, perceptual ability by orthographic input strength, and age by
amount of training.