Each Test phase (duration: approximately 11 min) consisted of 120 trials (50% = 60 trials/block “studied” see more words from the previous Study phase, 50% “unstudied” words that had not been presented in the experiment; order randomized for each participant) plus two “practice” trials at the beginning (unstudied words; ignored in analysis). One half of studied trials and one half of unstudied trials were preceded by related primes; the other halves were preceded by unrelated primes. The Conceptual
and Repetition priming conditions were blocked such that two consecutive Test phases contained either Conceptual primes or Repetition primes. No word was repeated across blocks. Block Order (Repetition/Conceptual Priming first) and Set-Condition mapping (A/B/C/D → Repetition/Conceptual × Primed/Unprimed)
were counterbalanced across participants, with a total cycle of eight participants. Stimuli were back-projected (60 Hz refresh rate; 1024 × 768 pixels) Selleck AZD6244 onto a screen behind the MRI scanner that participants viewed through a mirror. Words were presented in white on a black background. Responses were made with right and left index fingers, with finger-response mappings separately counterbalanced across participants for the Interestingness, Old/New, and R/K tasks. On completion of the main experiment, subjective and objective measures of prime awareness/visibility were collected. Participants were asked whether they noticed any “hidden words” (i.e., the masked primes) in the procedure, and whether they had been able to identify any of these words (subjective measures). The nature of the experiment, and in particular of the masked primes, was then explained. Participants then performed a Prime Visibility Test, in which 120 test trials were shown as during the experiment (fixation, forward mask, prime, backward mask, test cue), and participants were asked to indicate which of three (equally likely to be correct across trials) candidate words had been the prime on that trial. The three candidate primes were (a) the same word as the target (i.e., the Bacterial neuraminidase Repetition prime), (b) a
conceptually related word (i.e., the Conceptual prime), and (c) an unrelated word (Unprimed condition). Participants were encouraged to guess if they didn’t see the prime. Recollection and familiarity were estimated from proportions of trials given “remember” and “familiar” judgments under independence assumptions (“IRK”; Yonelinas and Jacoby, 1995), where recollection = R/N and familiarity = K/(N–R); R = number of R judgments; K = number of K judgments and N = total number of test trials. Separate estimates were made for studied (i.e., hits) and unstudied (i.e., Correct Rejection) trials, and for each priming condition. These estimates were analyzed using a multifactorial repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA).