Masked Priming Effect

The masked priming effect is a finding obtained using a widely used methodological technique in visual word recognition research in which a prime word or word fragment is presented extremely briefly, commonly for well under a tenth of a second, and is immediately preceded and followed by a pattern mask, so that participants cannot consciously identify, or often even detect, that a prime was shown at all, yet the prime is still found to measurably speed or slow the participant's response on a subsequent lexical decision or naming task involving a related target word. The technique was developed largely by the psychologists Kenneth Forster and Chris Davis in the early 1980s specifically to study early, automatic stages of visual word recognition without the results being contaminated by strategic or conscious guessing, since a prime that cannot be consciously perceived cannot be deliberately used by a participant to anticipate or shape their response to the target. Because it isolates automatic processing this way, masked priming has become a standard tool for investigating fine-grained questions in visual word recognition, including how a word's individual letters, sounds, and internal word-parts such as prefixes and suffixes are processed on the way to recognizing the word as a whole, questions that priming studies using a fully visible, consciously perceived prime are less well suited to answer cleanly.