Systematic Analysis of Long-lasting Repetition Priming in Degraded Picture Identification： An Approach from Information Processing Psychology

This study investigates repetition priming effects on picture identification and the underlying processes. Three groups of subjects (six intellectually handicapped, eight college students, and another seven college students in control) were presented 50 sets of degraded pictures where each set consisted of six stages ranging from very degraded to intact. The subjects were shown increasingly complete version of each stimulus and asked to identify them. First group of pictures were the same ones that were presented to two groups of subjects one year ago. The second ones were the mirror images of the original ones. The third ones were different pictures but had the same identities or names as the original ones. The fourth ones were new pictures but belonged to the same category as the original ones. Finally, the fifth ones were truly new pictures and not members of the original categories. The results showed that significant facilitation of picture identification had occurred in both experimental groups. Interestingly, actual facilitation must have occurred not only in exact repetition and in mirror-image repetition but also in same identity repetition. These results suggested that ambiguous pictures can activate more abstract conceptual representation as well as concrete perceptual representation