Automatic stimulus-response associations may be semantically mediated

Three experiments on numerical odd/even judgment are presented. In the first experiment, we show that tachistoscopically presented Arabic primes influence the reaction latencies (RTs) to Arabic targets in two ways: First, RTs to targets are longer when the prime and the target have a different parity status than when they share the same parity status, and second, on compatible trials, RTs are longer when the absolute distance between the prime and the target is larger. Experiments 2 and 3 extend the first finding by showing that the response compatibility effect is also obtained (1) when the primes are not part of the target set and the participants never reacted to them and (2) when the primes are presented in a different modality (verbal numerals) than are the targets (Arabic numerals). On the basis of these results, we conclude that, in masked priming, response codes are automatically activated by stimulus characteristics of the prime and that the activation of response codes is semantically mediated when the primes are meaningful.