Abstract

A priming technique was used to explore the early processing of the identity information and category information. Subjects were required to judge the identity or the category of the target. To examine whether the identity information and the category information are processed in iconic memory, a matrix consisting of multiple sets of nontarget-priming stimulus pairs was presented and a target stimulus appeared in the middle of a randomly selected priming-stimuli pair from the matrix with a variable time delay. Experimentally varied were the types of the priming stimuli(physically identical, response compatible. response irrelevant, response incompatible with the target) and the delay between the priming stimuli and the target presentation. The types of priming stimuli did not affect the speed of classification judgement on the target when a set of multiple priming stimuli were presented simultaneously. Based on these obervations, it was concluded that the identity information and the category information are processed not in iconic memory but in short-tem memory.