Abstract
Subjects were presented with real world fact(s) about a famous person and then were asked to respond “true” or “false” to a target fact about that person. Results showed that priming with facts from the same hierarchical cluster as the target led to faster verification of the target fact than did priming with facts from a different hierarchical cluster. However, increasing the number of priming sentences did not increase the resulting effect. These results are explained in terms of knowledge subsets, in which any particular knowledge domain can be partitioned into subsets. Verification occurs more rapidly when the target and prime are from the same subset than when they are from different subsets. Because an increase in the number of primes did not have an effect on verification time, however, the priming process appears to be automatic.
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We gratefully acknowledge Richard Reardon and Larry Toothaker for their comments on an earlier version of this article. In addition, we would like to thank Carol Manning for her help in certain of the statistical analyses and Robert Boyer for his assistance in data collection.
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Williams, K.W., Durso, F.T. Subsets of real world knowledge. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 24, 401–403 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330563
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330563