Abstract
If a stimulus is ignored, responses to a subsequent similar stimulus may be slowed (Neill, 1977; Tipper, 1985). Such "negative priming" can also apply to the location of an ignored stimulus in a target localization task (Tipper, Brehaut & Driver, 1990). In most demonstrations of spatial negative priming, there is a one-to-one correspondence of locations to responses. Consequently, it is ambiguous whether the suppression occurs for processing at a specific location, or for the response associated with that location. Some experiments suggest location suppression (e.g., Neill, Valdes & Terry, 1992), others suggest response suppression (e.g., Buckolz, Goldfarb & Khan, 2004). However, most experiments were designed to test only for one effect or the other. In the present experiment, subjects responded to the ordinal position of a target in one of four marked locations. On "prime" trials, an irrelevant distractor appeared at another location. Crucially, the display widths were varied, such that the inner two positions of "wide" displays coincided with the outer two positions of "narrow" displays. Thus, a "probe" target could appear in the location of the prime-trial distractor, but require a different response; or, a probe target could appear in a location different from the distractor, but require the same response. BOTH conditions yielded slower RT than control trials in which the probe target was unrelated to the prime-trial distractor or target. Ergo, spatial negative priming has BOTH location-specific and response-specific components.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014