| Abstract: | In eight experiments we investigated spatial and semantic priming effects. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjects made judgments about the locations of buildings on their campus and locations of states in the United States. We found that location judgments were faster when preceded by judgments about geographically near locations than by judgments about relatively far locations. In Experiments 3a, 3b, and 3c, subjects judged words as names of states of the United States or as nonstate words. No spatial priming effect was found in any experiment, nor was a priming effect found for nonstate words preceded by semantically related words. Experiment 4 compared spatial priming in a state–nonstate classification with a state-plus-location classification task. Spatial priming was found in the latter but not the former. These results are interpreted with an account that treats spatial and nonspatial knowledge as separate structures. Using the nonstate words of Experiment 3c, Experiments 5a and 5b together demonstrated semantic priming in a lexical decision task. The semantic priming results are interpreted with a postlexical checking-strategy account of semantic priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
