Nevertheless, compared to the earlier findings, more recent work has shown that semantic matching strategies can be active at SOAs as short as 150 ms (Koivisto, 1998) and automatic spreading activation can influence priming as long as 2000 ms (Deacon et al., 1999). In general, research evidence suggests that the N4 in the priming paradigm reflects different mechanisms, such as automatic spreading activation (Kutas and Hillyard, 1989; Kiefer and Spitzer, 2000; Deacon et al., 2000; Kiefer, 2002; Deacon et al., 2004), expectancy (Kutas et al., 1984; Silva-Pereyra et al., 1999) and semantic matching (Chwilla et al., 1998; Holcomb, 1993) depending on the paradigm used.
