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A connectionist model was developed to investigate the relationship between global and local information in visual perception, and an experiment tested a prediction generated by the model. The research focused on the fact that processing of global information is found to dominate processing of local information in many tasks ("global precedence"). The connectionist model demonstrated that global precedencecan arise out of simple parallel processing. The experintent demonstrated that rotating global elements eliminates Global Precedence. This empirical result supports the possibility, raised by the model, that Global Precedence is due in part to simplicity of Input-Output mapping.

In Experiment 1, priming increased with additional presentations when the priming task was to generate a potential meaning for each pseudoword but not when the priming task was to read each pseudoword aloud. In Experiments 2 and 3, repetition effects were found when Ss attempted to learn definitions assigned to the pseudowords by the experimenter. Equivalent levels of priming were found regardless of whether the definition assigned to a pseudoword changed or remained the same over 3 trials, although recall of the definitions was better for the consistently defined pseudowords. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the same mechanism underlies both word and pseudoword priming, except that words (and pseudowords that acquire meaning) benefit from the priming of orthographic-semantic associations.