Abstract
Two experiments were carried out to examine priming effects on a mental comparison task. In experiment I the category names (related/unrelated) or plus sign (neutral) were used as prime stimuli, followed by 10 item-pairs which belonged to the category of fruit or animal as target stimuli that were compared in terms of their real size. In experiment II the instance names were used as prime stimuli instead of the category names, and other conditions were the same as experiment I. The results of two experiments showed that priming effects occurred in a mental comparison task, and that those effects did not interact with the factors related to comparison. Priming effects in experiment II, particularly the inhibition effect were smaller than those in experiment I. These findings suggested that the strength of the semantic relatedness between prime and target influenced priming effects not only in the automatic spreading activation process but in the limited-capacity attentional process.
