摘要：Performance on word production and comprehension tasks can be facilitated (priming) or hindered (refractoryeffects) by item repetition. The mechanisms driving both types of effects have been debated. Accounts of repetitionpriming include residual activity of previous targets, strengthened connection weights to previous targets, andincreased neural efficiency for representation of stimuli. Refractoriness — declining performance with repeatedpresentations of target stimuli — has been attributed to both excessive inhibition of targets following activation(e.g., McCarthy & Kartsounis, 2000) and excessive excitation of previous targets (e.g., Schnur, Schwartz, Brecher, &Hodgson, 2006). Blocked cyclic naming and word-to-picture matching tasks, often used to study refractory effects,generally cannot differentiate between these two accounts because they include many semantically related itemsrepeated over many cycles.
