PROPERTIES AND MECHANISMS OF PERCEPTUAL PRIMING

Recent evidence suggests that the behavioral phenomenon of perceptual priming and the physiological finding of decreased neural responses wi th item repetition have similar properties. Both the behavioral and ne urophysiological effects show graded changes with multiple repetitions , are resistant to manipulations of particular stimulus attributes (e. g. size and location), and occur independently of awareness. These and other recent findings (e.g. from functional brain imaging in humans) suggest that perceptual priming may be mediated by decreased neural re sponses associated with perceptual learning.