title: Conceptual activation of distractors during selection is not sufficient to produce negative priming.
abstract: Negative priming (NP) occurs when responses are slower because the targets were distractors on the preceding trial. Word-naming NP occurs only with words that have been presented repeatedly as targets; novel words do not show NP. The activation-inhibition explanation is that representations of repeated-word distractors are activated already and must be inhibited; the inhibition carries over to the next trial. If this explanation is correct, novel-word NP should occur if the word is semantically primed (thus activating its representation) before it occurs as a distractor. In two experiments, there was NP for words from a repeated set, and the magnitude of NP increased when the same word could occur as a target on consecutive trials. There was positive, rather than negative, priming for novel-word targets that had been semantically primed as distractors. Either the activation from semantic priming was not sufficiently strong to require inhibition, or the activation-inhibition hypothesis does not refer to activation of conceptual representations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames 50011-3180, USA. vjdark@iastate.edu
authors.forename: V J
authors.initials: VJ
authors.lastname: Dark
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Schmidt
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary