Negative priming provides one useful measure of attentional focus and cognitive control, requirements of most domains of life (driving, work, play, etc.). Until now, 2 types of negative priming have been identified: identity negative priming and location negative priming. These effects are of particular interest because individuals who have difficulty ignoring distraction (e.g., individuals with schizophrenia and attention-deficit disorder) exhibit reduced levels of negative priming. In the present experiments (N = 187), we report an entirely new type of negative priming based on when in time a target appears (temporal negative priming) rather than its identity or spatial location. Results indicate that responses to a target’s temporal position were impaired when a distractor previously appeared at that same relative temporal position. In addition, temporal positioning was teased apart from response-based mechanisms and both were found to independently contribute to temporal negative priming. This result indicates that mechanisms of cognitive control trigger both response-based and memory-based processes.

Prior work has found negative priming for a sequence (Cock, et al., 2002; Hughes & Jones, 2003) and more purely time-based negative priming has also been identified (Kahan, et al., 2020). Though sequential effects have been reported with both visual and auditory stimuli, only visual stimuli have been used in experiments examining purely temporal negative priming. In this paper sequential and temporal negative priming are compared across modalities. Prime trials included random presentation of a target (auditory bird chirp or visual X), a non-target (auditory dog bark or visual O) and two neutral stimuli (auditory computer beeps or empty visual boxes). Probe trials included random presentation of the target and three neutral stimuli. Participants indicated the temporal location of the target. On 88% of the trials, participants (N=119 in Experiment 1; N=65 in Experiment 2) indicated the location of the non-target stimulus from the prime trial. Results showed an increase in response time when the temporal location of the probe’s target was the same as the location of the non-target stimulus from the prime trial, but this only occurred when the prime was presented more slowly. Experiment 2 tested, and falsified, the hypothesis that a fixed amount of time on the prime is necessary in order to bind features of the non-target stimulus with temporal and sequential positions. Together these data show that sequential and temporal negative priming effects generalize across modality and that relative rather than fixed timing is critical. Implications for theories of negative priming are discussed.