Correction for Golomb, “Reply to Blazer et al. : Flawed challenges to ‘Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and Gulf War illnesses’,”

Spatial priming in ecologically relevant reference frames

“…Jiang, Swallow, and Capistrano (2013) reasoned that learning often happens from a consistent viewpoint, in environments with constrained structures, such that an egocentric learning mechanism would be more useful. Moreover, these results may be dependent on the environmental scale, as probability cueing has been observed in allocentric coordinates when tested in larger, relatively unconstrained, real-world environments (Jiang, Won, Swallow, & Mussack, 2014;Smith, Hood & Gilchrist, 2008;2010). Note that these experiments are not directly comparable to the present work, because we held body/head position constant, and one could imagine that priming may be dependent on the observer maintaining a single position.…”

“…Indeed, target predictability has been shown to yield RT benefits above and beyond standard spatial priming (Geyer & Müller, 2009). This limitation also applies to subsequent studies that examined spatial priming across multiple reference frames (e.g., Ball, Smith, Ellison & Schenk, 2009;2010;Ball, Lane, Ellison & Schenk, 2011), in that it was not possible to disentangle the potential contributions of spatial priming from strategic goal-driven attention based on explicit knowledge. Given the broad array of goal-driven attentional phenomena documented in the literature, this distinction is critical, and we thus removed potential goal-driven components from our experimental design.…”

“…As mentioned in the introduction, several studies have examined such inhibitory effects (e.g., Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1996;Geyer et al, 2007;2010), and it would be interesting to contrast them across the reference frames. However, measuring inhibitory priming requires a control condition in which the target on the current trial is placed in a location that was empty in the previous trial, and we did not design our stimuli to allow for this (but see the recent work by Gokce et al, 2015, who did examine inhibitory priming across multiple reference frames and found exclusively object-centered effects).…”

“…Faster RTs were found when the pop-out target appeared in a location that had previously been occupied by a target. Additionally, a complementary inhibition effect was observed, in which RTs were slowed when the target stimulus appeared in a location that had been previously occupied by a distractor (see also Geyer et al, 2007;2010). Maljkovic and Nakayama observed these priming effects to be driven most strongly by the trial immediately preceding the current trial (i.e., the n -1 trial, where n represents the current trial), but the effects were also reliably driven by stimuli from as early as the n -8 trial.…”