Cognitive Task Report
Lexical Decision — Associative Priming (Block 1)
Forward priming of 48 ms (you responded faster to related targets)
Block 1 contrasts forward associates (the prime brings the target to mind) with backward associates (the target brings the prime to mind). A positive priming effect means you recognized targets faster when they followed a related word. Forward priming can arise automatically; substantial backward priming usually points to slower, strategic processing.
What This Task Measures
The lexical decision task asks you to decide, as quickly as you can, whether each letter string is a real word or a non-word. Although it looks like a simple word-recognition probe, performance is gated by attentional control over lexical processing pathways: how well attention weights the relevant links between a word's spelling and its meaning, suppresses irrelevant ones, and feeds a word/non-word decision stage (Balota, Paul & Spieler, 1999). The two-block Semantic Priming Project design separates the part of priming that depends on attention from the part that does not. Associative priming (Block 1) and the short 200 ms prime interval reflect largely automatic spreading activation, which runs off quickly with little attentional involvement. The long 1200 ms interval (Block 2) leaves time for slower, strategic processing, so the long-interval priming component is the attention-dependent, controlled part of the effect (Neely, 1977). Attentional control is a top-down, prefrontal, catecholaminergic gate. When it is taxed — as in ADHD — the signature is elevated reaction-time variability and occasional lapses rather than uniform slowing, and the controlled (long-interval) priming component is the part most sensitive to it. Because attention/processing-speed difficulty and phonological-decoding (reading) difficulty can both slow lexical decisions, contrasting your word responses with your non-word (pseudoword) responses helps separate an attention/processing-speed source from a decoding source (De Jong et al., 2009). In this session you showed a forward-priming advantage (+48 ms), the component that can arise relatively automatically.
Performance Indices
These figures describe this respondent's own within-session performance — reaction-time differences and accuracy across conditions. They are reported as raw effects, not as population percentiles.
| Forward priming (your data) | +48 ms |
| Backward priming (your data) | +21 ms |
| Mean RT — forward related | 617 ms |
| Mean RT — forward unrelated | 664 ms |
| Mean RT — backward related | 650 ms |
| Mean RT — backward unrelated | 670 ms |
| Word accuracy | 93% |
| Non-word accuracy | 80% |
| Published reference — forward priming (standardized) | +0.187 z |
| Published reference — backward priming (standardized) | +0.224 z |
Method & Limitations
Priming is reported as a within-subject reaction-time difference (mean RT to unrelated targets minus mean RT to related targets), computed from your correct word responses between 200–3000 ms. It is not norm-referenced: there is no percentile and no T-score, because lexical-decision latencies depend heavily on the display, keyboard, and browser timing used here. The published Semantic Priming Project magnitudes are shown as a standardized reference (a unitless z value) for context only and are not directly comparable to your milliseconds. This is a research-grade index of attentional-control processes — not a diagnostic test for ADHD, dyslexia, or any other condition.
References
- Balota, D. A., Paul, S. T., & Spieler, D. H. (1999). Attentional control of lexical processing pathways during word recognition and reading. In S. Garrod & M. Pickering (Eds.), Language processing (pp. 15–57). Psychology Press.
- Neely, J. H. (1977). Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Roles of inhibitionless spreading activation and limited-capacity attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 106(3), 226–254.
- De Jong, C. G. W., Van De Voorde, S., Roeyers, H., Raymaekers, R., Oosterlaan, J., & Sergeant, J. A. (2009). How distinctive are ADHD and RD? Results of a double dissociation study. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, 19(6), 699–707.
- Hutchison, K. A., Balota, D. A., Neely, J. H., et al. (2013). The semantic priming project. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 1099–1114.