[Conscious levels of processing a preceding stimulus and priming effect].

This study was conducted to investigate how two different conditions of processing a prime would affect the lexical decision time of a target. One condition was called the conscious condition, where a prime was presented for 250 ms and a subject was instructed to expect any target from that prime. Another condition was the unconscious condition, where a prime was briefly exposed and followed by a pattern mask so that a subject could not identify it. The effect of an associative strength of prime-target relatedness was also investigated. The associative strength of prime-target relatedness in the related condition was relatively weak in Exp. I, and strong in Exp. II. In the conscious condition, facilitation and inhibition were found both in Exp. I and in Exp. II. On the other hand, in the unconscious condition, only inhibition was found in Exp. I, but only facilitation in Exp. II. These results suggest that automatic activation and attention system were both needed to account for priming effect.