Evidence from masked-priming that initial identification of brand names is via abstract letter identities

Nick D Martin*, Colin J Davis

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)
300 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Although visual-word recognition is often assumed to proceed on the basis of case-invariant letter representations, previous research has shown a role for letter-case in recognizing brand names. One recent study reported early effects of letter-case in a brand-decision task using masked primes (Perea et al., 2015, British Journal of Psychology, 106, 162). The present study attempts to replicate this finding using brand names typically presented in all lowercase (e.g., adidas), all uppercase (e.g., IKEA), or titlecase (e.g., Ford). Across three masked-priming experiments, we found no advantage for case-matched identity primes over case-mismatched identity primes. This finding suggests that brand-specific letter-case information does not play a role in the early processing of brand names. However, we observed evidence that case may be used as a cue for making brand decisions, which may explain the effect reported by Perea et al. (2015, British Journal of Psychology, 106, 162).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)745-768
Number of pages24
JournalBritish Journal of Psychology
Volume110
Issue number4
Early online date4 Jan 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2019

Research Groups and Themes

  • Language
  • Cognitive Science

Keywords

  • brand names
  • letter-case
  • lexical decision
  • masked-priming
  • reading

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