Long- and short-term negative and positive priming

Abstract

Negative priming is a selective attention phenomenon that refers to impaired performance to a target when the target appeared as a distractor in a previous trial (Tipper, 1985). Although DeSchepper and Treisman (1996) demonstrated long-term negative priming, a number of researchers have failed to replicate their findings. We present two empirical studies that demonstrate robust and general long-term negative priming without multiple stimulus repetitions. We also show that repetition increases and delay decreases the effect of negative priming. These findings confirm predictions of associative accounts of negative priming. Thus, negative priming may be seen not only as a product of selective attention, but also as an instance of general learning in the cognitive system. Early theories of attention tended to focus on the object of attention. These theories emphasized the facilitating "spotlight" at the center of attention, and the remaining areas of visual space were largely ignored (e.g., Broadbent, 1958). More recently, however, researchers have developed evidence of an inhibitory effect of attention on objects that fall outside the spotlight. In particular, if some part of a visual display (either an object or a location) is to be ignored at some point in time, responses to that same item (or to one that is sufficiently similar) will be inhibited (i.e., slower or less accurate) at subsequent points in time. This inhibitory effect of ignoring an object has been termed negative priming (Tipper, 1985). A typical negative priming experiment consists of pairs of visual displays. Before any stimuli are displayed, partic