SIGNAL-DETECTION-THEORY AND MODULARITY - ON BEING SENSITIVE TO THE POWER OF BIAS MODELS OF SEMANTIC PRIMING

G. Rhodes, A.J. Parkin, and T. Tremewan (1993) have shown that semantic priming influences signal detection theory measures of sensitivity in visual word recognition. Following an argument presented by M. Farah (1989), they suggested that this is evidence that semantic information influences perceptual encoding, and that such an influence represents a violation of modularity. This article shows that, contrary to M. Farah's claim, measures of sensitivity cannot be assumed to reflect the operation of perceptual encoding. Simulations are presented to demonstrate that modular criterion-bias models of priming in which priming has no effect on perceptual encoding predict the same sensitivity effects that G. Rhodes et al. take as evidence against modularity.