Attentional control and priming: The distractor set hypothesis.

Abstract

Repeating a single-prime stimulus as a target to respond to usually facilitates responses. However, sometimes, prime repetition slows the responses and produces the single-prime negative priming effect. In this study, the distractor set hypothesis was proposed as a mechanism of attentional control that can contribute toward single-prime negative priming. In Experiments 1a-1d, an integrated Stroop task was used. The results showed that the prime produced negative priming only when it matched the form of the competing distractors. A separate Stroop task was used in Experiments 2 and 3 and a flanker task was used in Experiments 4a and 4b. In both tasks, the results suggested that a prime produced negative priming when the location of the prime matched that of the distractors. In Experiment 5, alternative explanations including the effects of the prime-to-distractor similarity and the target set were examined. The results revealed that the distractor set, rather than the target set and the similarity between the prime and distractor, could better account for the negative priming effect.

The Role of Prominence in Activating Focused Words and Their Alternatives in Mandarin: Evidence from Lexical Priming and Recognition Memory

“…In Braun and Tagliapietra (2010), for Dutch, the noncontrastive associates were weakly primed regardless of focus condition in immediate processing (0 milliseconds), relative to the unrelated alternatives; while in English, Husband and Ferreira (2016) showed that noncontrastive associates were primed regardless of focus condition in immediate processing (0 milliseconds), and they were suppressed by focus in later processing (750 milliseconds). Husband and Ferreira’s (2016) results are consistent with our recent study in English (Calhoun et al, under review). Our study, using similar experimental manipulations to Husband and Ferreira (2016) with ISI of 750 milliseconds, and with the additional unrelated alternative condition, found the same pattern of results to Husband and Ferreira (although we did not test immediate processing).…”

“…It is important to note their control condition was effectively an unrelated alternative (i.e., pelican can also be substituted for celebrity in (4) and (5)). Our recent findings for English (Calhoun et al, under review) confirm earlier post hoc analysis in German (Gotzner, 2015) (see section 3.2.2) that unrelative alternatives may also be primed by focus-marking. Therefore, the more reasonable interpretation of Braun and Tagliapietra (2010) would be that the activation of related alternatives is stronger than that of unrelated alternatives when the prime word is marked with prosodic focus-marking at ISI of 0 milliseconds; however, we still do not know whether the related alternatives were primed without focus-marking, relative to noncontrastive unrelated controls.…”

“…We followed the methodology used by Husband and Ferreira (2016), Gotzner (2017), and Yan and Calhoun (2019), in which the same prime was used across conditions, with different target words in each condition. We chose not to use different primes and the same target, as per Braun and Tagliapietra (2010), as this would mean having an unrelated alternative as the control, and Gotzner (2015) and Calhoun et al (under review) showed such unrelated alternatives may be primed by focus-marking in German and English.…”