Probe distractors can influence negative priming by perceptual grouping

Negative priming occurs when a response is slower to a target that was a previously ignored stimulus. According to a computational model of inhibition, negative priming results from relative activation between a target and a distractor in probe trials. Thus, the degree of competition in the probe trial should influence negative priming. The results from three experiments supported this hypothesis. Probe distractors grouped with a target by a rectangle produced a larger negative priming effect than did distractors isolated from the target. Moreover, neither prime-probe similarity nor perceptual interference could explain the grouping effect. The results suggest that perceptual mechanisms can influence negative priming via a race in the probe trial.     

Response-retrieval and negative priming

The existence of across-notation automatic numerical processing of two-digit (2D) numbers was explored using size comparisons tasks. Participants were Arabic speakers, who use two sets of numerical symbols—Arabic and Indian. They were presented with pairs of 2D numbers in the same or in mixed notations. Responses for a numerical comparison task were affected by decade difference and unit-decade compatibility and global distance in both conditions, extending previous findings with Arabic digits (Nuerk, Weger, & Willmes, 2001). Responses for a physical comparison task were affected by congruency with the numerical size, as indicated by the size congruency effect (SiCE). The SiCE was affected by unit-decade compatibility but not by global distance, thus suggesting that the units and decades digits of the 2D numbers, but not the whole number value were automatically translated into a common representation of magnitude. The presence of similar results for same- and mixed-notation pairs supports the idea of an abstract representation of magnitude.     

Phonological cues influence sex decisions about novel names

Investigations of first names in English have found that male and female names are distinguished by different phonological characteristics. This paper reports on findings that suggest native speakers of English rely on those same cues when making judgments about the sex of names with which they are unfamiliar. When presented with 40 novel, i.e., "invented" names, 25 university undergraduates judged one-syllable names and consonant-final names as male names; however, they judged two-syllable names and vowel-final names as female names. These findings indicate that certain phonological features are strong enough predictors of sex that they can be used to designate sex even with names never before encountered.     

Lateralized repetition priming for familiar faces: Evidence for asymmetric interhemispheric cooperation

Repetition priming refers to facilitated recognition of stimuli that have been seen previously. Although a great deal of work has examined the properties of repetition priming for familiar faces, little has examined the neuroanatomical basis of the effect. Two experiments are presented in this paper that combine the repetition priming paradigm with a divided visual field methodology to examine lateralized recognition of familiar faces. In the first experiment participants were presented with prime faces unilaterally to each visual field and target faces foveally. A significant priming effect was found for prime faces presented to the right hemisphere, but not for prime faces presented to the left hemisphere. In Experiment 2, prime and target faces were presented unilaterally, either to the same visual field or to the opposite visual field (i.e., either within hemisphere or across hemispheres). A significant priming effect was found for the within right hemisphere condition, but not for the within left hemisphere condition, replicating the findings of the first experiment. Priming was also found in both of the across hemispheres conditions, suggesting that interhemispheric cooperation occurs to aid recognition. Taken in combination these experiments provide two main findings. First, an asymmetric repetition priming effect was found, possibly as a result of asymmetric levels of activation following recognition of a prime face, with greater priming occurring within the right hemisphere. Second, there is evidence for asymmetric interhemispheric cooperation with transfer of information from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere to facilitate recognition.     

Lateralized repetition priming for familiar faces: Evidence for asymmetric interhemispheric cooperation

Repetition priming refers to facilitated recognition of stimuli that have been seen previously. Although a great deal of work has examined the properties of repetition priming for familiar faces, little has examined the neuroanatomical basis of the effect. Two experiments are presented in this paper that combine the repetition priming paradigm with a divided visual field methodology to examine lateralized recognition of familiar faces. In the first experiment participants were presented with prime faces unilaterally to each visual field and target faces foveally. A significant priming effect was found for prime faces presented to the right hemisphere, but not for prime faces presented to the left hemisphere. In Experiment 2, prime and target faces were presented unilaterally, either to the same visual field or to the opposite visual field (i.e., either within hemisphere or across hemispheres). A significant priming effect was found for the within right hemisphere condition, but not for the within left hemisphere condition, replicating the findings of the first experiment. Priming was also found in both of the across hemispheres conditions, suggesting that interhemispheric cooperation occurs to aid recognition. Taken in combination these experiments provide two main findings. First, an asymmetric repetition priming effect was found, possibly as a result of asymmetric levels of activation following recognition of a prime face, with greater priming occurring within the right hemisphere. Second, there is evidence for asymmetric interhemispheric cooperation with transfer of information from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere to facilitate recognition.     

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language

It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener’s linguistic background, e.g., on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians. These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.     

Infants' sensitivity to allophonic cues for word segmentation

A series of four experiments was conducted to determine whether English-learning infants can use allophonic cues to word boundaries to segment words from fluent speech. Infants were familiarized with a pair of two-syllable items, such as nitrates and night rates and then were tested on their ability to detect these same words in fluent speech passages. The presence of allophonic cues to word boundaries did not help 9-month-olds to distinguish one of the familiarized words from an acoustically similar foil. Infants familiarized with nitrates were just as likely to listen to a passage about night rates as they were to listen to one about nitrates. Nevertheless, when the passages contained distributional cues that favored the extraction of the familiarized targets, 9-month-olds were able to segment these items from fluent speech. By the age of 10.5 months, infants were able to rely solely on allophonic cues to locate the familiarized target words in passages. We consider what implications these findings have for understanding how word segmentation skills develop.     

The influence of distractor-only prime trials on the location negative priming mechanism

Two experiments were conducted that examined the influence of distractor-only prime trials on the "location" negative priming (NP) effect. In all experiments, the probe trial always lacked a distractor. We showed that the predictable absence of a probe distractor caused the elimination of the location NP effect when the prime trial contained both a target and a distractor event (T + D-->T), but not when the prime contained only a to-be-ignored distractor event (D-->T) (Milliken, Tipper, Houghton, & Lupianez, 2000). The preservation of the NP effect seen with the distractor-only prime trials (D-->T) was not the result of its lacking a prime-trial selection, nor was it the consequence of its representing a higher level of episodic similarity than the T + D-->T condition. Finally, the location NP effect observed for the D-->T condition is seemingly consistent with the view that location NP and the inhibition-of-return effects share a common underlying process (Milliken et al., 2000).     

Repetition priming and the haptic recognition of familiar and unfamiliar objects

In four experiments, we examined the haptic recognition of 3-D objects. In Experiment 1, blindfolded participants named everyday objects presented haptically in two blocks. There was significant priming of naming, but no cost of an object changing orientation between blocks. However, typical orientations of objects were recognized more quickly than nonstandard orientations. In Experiment 2, participants accurately performed an unannounced test of memory for orientation. The lack of orientation-specific priming in Experiment 1, therefore, was not because participants could not remember the orientation at which they had first felt an object. In Experiment 3, we examined haptic naming of objects that were primed either haptically or visually. Haptic priming was greater than visual priming, although significant cross-modal priming was also observed. In Experiment 4, we tested recognition memory for familiar and unfamiliar objects using an old-new recognition task. Objects were recognized best when they were presented in the same orientation in both blocks, suggesting that haptic object recognition is orientation sensitive. Photographs of the unfamiliar objects may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Spatial stimulus-response compatibility and negative priming

According to Kornblum's (1992) dimensional overlap model, when an incongruent response to a stimulus is required, automatic activation of the congruent response must first be inhibited. Shiu and Kornblum (1996a) provided evidence for such inhibition in an incongruent symbolic negative priming task. Reaction time was longer when a trial's correct response was the name of the stimulus from the previous trial than when it was not. We report three experiments that test this inhibition hypothesis for spatial stimuli and responses. In Experiment 1, which used a spatial mapping analogous to the symbolic mapping used by Shiu and Kornblum (1996a), a similar negative priming effect was found. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, which used mappings that were conducive to simple transformational rules, a positive priming effect was obtained. The results suggest that inhibition in response selection may depend on the complexity of the relations between the stimuli and responses.     

Varieties of positive and negative priming

Numerous recent investigations have focused on a particular relation between the roles a stimulus plays in successive displays: when a stimulus ignored by a subject on one occasion is to be attended on a succeeding occasion, reaction time to that stimulus is slowed relative to a control condition. But this is but one possible case ofnegative priming. There are other ways in which negative priming might occur, and there are several varieties of positive priming as well. All these possibilities were explored in the present experiment.     

Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants

There is growing evidence that infants become sensitive to the probabilistic phonotactics of their ambient language sometime during the second half of their first year. The present study investigates whether 9-month-olds make use of phonotactic cues to segment words from fluent speech. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, we found that infants listened to a CVC stimulus longer when the stimulus previously appeared in a sentential context with good phonotactic cues than when it appeared in one without such cues. The goodness of the phonotactic cues was estimated from the frequency with which the C.C clusters at the onset and offset of a CVC test stimulus (i.e. C.CVC.C) are found within and between words in child-directed speech, with high between-word probability associated with good cues to word boundaries. A similar segmentation result emerged when good phonotactic cues occurred only at the onset (i.e. C.CVC.C) or the offset (i.e. C.CVC.C) of the target words in the utterances. Together, the results suggest that 9-month-olds use probabilistic phonotactics to segment speech into words and that high-probability between-word clusters are interpreted as both word onsets and word offsets.     

Action-centred negative priming: Evidence for reactive inhibition

Experiments are described in which the spatial relationship between a stimulus and respondent is held constant in terms of visual and body-centred coordinates, while the complexity of the response is manipulated. It is demonstrated that the degree of complexity of an action directed to the same spatial location determines the level of negative priming observed. This result supports the notions that (1) inhibitory selection mechanisms act on action-centred representations, and (2) the level of inhibition is reactive to the relative potency of the evoked action. The results are also discussed in terms of alternative explanations of negative priming. It is concluded that the results are inconsistent with theories that do not involve inhibitory selection mechanisms.     

Global/local processing and negative priming: the influence of selection difficulty and stimulus exposure

Negative priming is a decrement in performance observed when a previously ignored stimulus is re-presented as a target. The present study examined the relation between selection difficulty and negative priming in five experiments that used hierarchical stimuli (large letters made up by small letters). The results show that negative priming is greater when subjects direct attention to the local level (more difficult selection) than when they direct attention to the global level (less difficult selection). However, that occurs only when exposure of prime and probe is sufficiently long. With shorter presentations, negative priming is still observed but is no longer modulated by selection difficulty. These results suggest that both anticipatory and reactive mechanisms are responsible for the occurrence of negative priming and that instantiation of the reactive mechanism depends on the time available for prime and probe selection. Received: 17 January 2000 / Accepted: 3 July 2000     

Dissociations between identity and location negative priming

Negative priming refers to the phenomenon of a slowed response time to a previously ignored distractor. Identity negative priming can be observed when the identity of a previous distractor is repeated as the target identity, and location negative priming can be observed when the spatial location of a previous distractor is repeated as the target location. This article reviewed and integrated previous findings and provided empirical evidence to show the dissociations between location and identity negative priming: (a) the removal of probe distractor impeded identity negative priming but not location negative priming; (b) identity negative priming was modulated by the distance between the target and distractor, while location negative priming was not; and (c) perceptual grouping of the target and distractor affected identity negative priming but not location negative priming.     

Mask-induced priming and the negative compatibility effect

Under certain conditions, masked primes have produced counter-intuitive negative compatibility effects (NCE), such that RT is increased, not decreased, when the target is similar to the prime. This NCE has been interpreted as an index of automatic motor inhibition, triggered to suppress the partial motor activation caused by the prime. An alternative explanation is that perceptual interactions between prime and mask produce positive priming in the opposite direction to the prime, explaining the NCE without postulating inhibition. Here the potential role of this "mask-induced priming" was investigated in two experiments, using masks composed of random lines. Experiment 1 compared masks that included features of the primes and targets with masks that did not. The former should create more mask-induced priming, but the NCE did not differ between masks. Experiment 2 employed masks that contained features of either one target or the other, but not both. These asymmetric masks produced significant mask-induced priming, but it was insufficient in size to account for the prime-related NCE. Thus mask composition can contribute to NCEs, but when random line masks are employed, the major source of the NCE seems to be motor-inhibition.     

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

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.     

No evidence for a cue mismatch in negative priming

An experiment is reported in which the cue mismatch hypothesis of negative priming, an important novel variant of the mismatching hypothesis, was tested. A cue mismatch and a no mismatch condition were contrasted in a visual discrimination task. In the prime display of cue mismatch ignored-repetition trials, the colour of the prime distractor was different from the colour of the cue indicating the selection feature (coloured square). In probe displays, cue and repeated stimulus had the same colour. In the no mismatch condition, the visual cue was neutral in terms of colour (always black), so that there was always no cue mismatch between prime and probe displays. Contrary to the prediction of the cue mismatch hypothesis, the negative priming effect was not larger in the cue mismatch than in the no mismatch condition. The cue mismatch hypothesis must therefore be rejected. In contrast, the episodic retrieval account is consistent with the results.     

Dissociative prime-probe contextual similarity effects on negative priming and repetition priming: a challenge to episodic retrieval as a unified account of negative priming

This study examined the dependence of repetition priming (RP) and negative priming (NP) as a function of prime-probe contextual similarity in a paradigm in which participants were required to respond to a letter flanked by incompatible distractor letters (e.g., ABA). Experiment 1 used prime and probe displays containing a pair of "+" symbols that were presented horizontally or vertically. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated whether the letter triplets contained the "!" symbol. In all experiments, regardless of whether the RP trials were intermixed with the NP trials (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 3), RP was stronger in the prime-probe similar conditions than in the prime-probe dissimilar conditions, but NP was independent of prime-probe contextual similarity. These findings suggest that NP is not necessarily stronger in conditions in which episodic retrieval of the prime is more likely.