Automaticity in early visual processing: ages ten to sixty

A priming paradigm and a paradigm requiring apparent duration judgments for tachistoscopic presentations were used to provide converging tests for prerecognition automatic semantic access and to investigate developmental changes in early processing. Subjects from four different age groups (fifth and sixth graders, college age, thirty year olds, fifty year olds) participated in each of the two experiments. In the priming task, prime stimuli were presented tachistoscopically for durations which had previously shown, for individual subjects, chance level detection of stimulus presence versus absence. In the duration judgment task, stimulus exposure durations were, for each age group, the means of the duration for chance level presence-absence detection;The priming paradigm did not provide evidence for automatic semantic facilitation for any age group. The data suggested a need to more clearly differentiate between a global lexical and a specific semantic access to long term memory. Prerecognition processing was evident in two age groups in the apparent duration experiment, although the specific effects of lexical and semantic parameters differed from previous findings. Developmental differences were evident only in the presence-absence detection thresholds; the other tasks did not reveal age-related changes