Leading, but not trailing, primes influence temporal order perception: Further evidence for an attentional account of perceptual latency priming.

Presenting a masked prime leading a target influences the perceived onset of the masking target. This priming effect is explained by the asynchronous updating model: The prime initiates attentional allocation toward its location, which renders a trailing target at the same place consciously available earlier. In 3 experiments, this perceptual latency priming by leading primes was examined jointly with the effects of trailing primes in order to compare the explanation of the asynchronous updating model with the onset-averaging and the P-center hypotheses. Exp 1 (n=15, mean age 27.1 yrs) showed that an attended, as well as an unattended, prime leads to perceptual latency priming. In addition, a large effect of trailing primes on the onset of a target was found. As Exp 2 (n=13, mean age 26.5 yrs) demonstrated, this effect is quite robust, although smaller than that of a leading prime. In Exp 3 (n=13, mean age 24.8 yrs), masked primes were used. Under these conditions, no influence of tra