Attention modulates the contextual similarity effect in negative priming: evidence from task demand and attentional capture

ABSTRACT

Negative priming refers to the delayed response to a probe target that was previously a prime distractor. Memory retrieval has been proposed as one critical mechanism for the manifestation of negative priming. This perspective perpetuates that the contextual similarity between prime and probe trials should modulate memory retrieval, and therefore, affect negative priming. However, evidence for the contextual similarity effect in negative priming is mixed. The present study tested the hypothesis that attended contextual cues are more likely to be encoded into a distractor representation, and thus, are more likely to modulate the negative priming effect. By manipulating whether the contextual cues were relevant to the task demand in Section 1, and by manipulating whether cues had an abrupt or simultaneous onset, and by analysing reaction time (RT) distributions of the data in Section 2, our results demonstrated that attended cues produced the contextual similarity effect in negative priming, especially when RTs were long.

KEYWORDS:

• Abrupt onset
• attentional capture
• contextual similarity
• distractor representation
• task demand
• negative priming

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under Grant NSC 102-2410-H-033-008-MY3 and Grant MOST 105-2410-H-033-013-MY3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of interests

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan: [Grant Number MOST 105-2410-H-033-013 -MY3,NSC 102-2410-H-033-008-MY3].