Priming of Abstract Letter Identities in the Letter Match Task

Abstract

Previous studies of letter recognition have not found priming for abstract letter identities. We used a task that required participants to decide whether a target is the same or different from a reference letter presented in opposite case, which avoids the shortcomings of tasks used in previous studies. We found robust priming effects in this task, which were the same size for letter pairs that have similar visual features across case (e.g., c/C, x/X) and dissimilar features (e.g., a/A, b/B). Also, the pattern of priming was the same whether the prime was in the same or different case as the reference. We take these findings as evidence that abstract letter identities support priming in this task. We suggest that the same–different match task is a useful tool for studying representations used to support masked priming in letter recognition and with other stimuli with limited set size.