Self Priming: A Short term Benefit of Repetition

Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990) developed an interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of person recognition that gives a parsimonious account of semantic and repetition priming effects with seen faces and names. This model predicts that a familiarity decision to a person's name should be facilitated if the name is immediately preceded by the same person's face (or vice versa); Burton et al. (1990) called this effect “self priming”. In three experiments, we explored properties of self priming predicted from Burton et al.'s (1990) IAC model. When each stimulus is seen on only one trial, the Burton et al. (1990) model predicts that within-domain self priming (e.g. name prime-name target) should produce more facilitation than cross-domain self priming (e.g. face prime-name target). This prediction was investigated in Experiments 1 and 2; results were consistent with it. Two further predictions from the Burton et al. (1990) model are that the amounts of within and cross-domain self priming should not differ when subjects are primed to recognize the targets by prior encounters during the experiment, and that self priming should produce more facilitation than semantic priming. Results of Experiment 3 were again consistent with both predictions. We conclude that the Burton et al. (1990) IAC model stands the test of further rigorous examination.