Disengagement of the location negative priming effect: The influence of an intervening response

Abstract

Reaction time is significantly longer when a target stimulus arises at a location that has just contained a distractor event, relative to when it appears at a new location [i.e., called, the location negative priming (NP) effect]. The NP effect is eliminated when the second of two paired trials (i.e., prime-to-probe trials) predictably lacks a distractor when the preceding trial contains both a target and a distractor event (T+D), but not when a prime distractor appears alone (D-only). We tested the possibility that the failed NP process disengagement seen with D-only prime trials resulted because they do not require the production of an overt intervening response. This possibility was supported. Results also showed that the intervening response had to meet prerequisites; namely, the response had to be prime-generated, i.e., come from the subset of experimental responses and have engaged in a conflict with the prime distractor-activated response.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a doctoral scholarship awarded to the first author from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) and by an NSERC operating grant awarded to the second author. We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting a version of Experiment 1, and to Ioan Todoran for programming the tasks used in the experiments reported here.