Effects of extraversion and self-report arousal on semantic priming: A connectionist approach.

Simulation and experimental data were used to test the hypothesis that extraversion and self-report arousal affect the spread of activation in a connectionist semantic network, assessed by priming of lexical decision. A simulation of network activation processes showed that individual differences in different network parameters predict different patterns of observable individual differences in response time. Two experiments using undergraduate Ss showed that extraversion and arousal interactively affect priming magnitude, irrespective of the time lag between prime and target word and of prime stimulus quality. The simulation data suggest that the personality effects obtained experimentally may be governed by a specific network parameter: individual differences in the level of random noise. Connectionist models may provide a general framework for explaining arousal-dependent effects of extraversion on cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)