Abstract
Ignoring a distractor on a prime trial generally impairs responses to that object on a subsequent probe trial. This negative-priming (NP) effect supports the notion that distracting objects are actively inhibited during target selection (Tipper, 1985). Alternatively, NP may be caused either by amismatch between the features of items across prime and probe trials (Park & Kanwisher, 1994) or by the episodic retrieval of information from the prime trial which conflicts with the current, correct response (Neill & Valdes, 1992). These alternative accounts are called theselective inhibition,feature mismatching, andepisodic retrieval hypotheses, respectively. The present paper reviews the NP literature and considers the evidence for each of the three accounts. Feature mismatching does produce NP in a limited number of cases, but it is not a necessary condition for NP. In other cases, NP must be due to either selective inhibition or episodic retrieval of previously ignored distractors. Though results from critical tests designed to discriminate among these hypotheses have not yet been reported, such results are crucial for both theoretical and practical reasons.
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Much of this work was conducted while the author was with the Department of Psychology, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, and during a sabbatical period at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, U.K. I thank John Flowers, Bill Johnston, Murray White, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to James Neely and Tram Neill, whose comments were particularly helpful in facilitating revision of this article.
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Fox, E. Negative priming from ignored distractors in visual selection: A review. Psychon Bull Rev 2, 145–173 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210958
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210958
