Relevant distractors do not cause negative priming

Highly relevant stimuli (such as one’s own name) can capture attention in situations in which one can only partially attend to the environment (e.g., the classic “cocktail party” phenomenon, introduced by Moray, 1959). The present study extends previous findings on selection tasks demonstrating these intrusions of relevant stimuli. Not only can highly relevant stimuli be detected more easily, but attempts to deliberately ignore them will also be hampered, so subsequent reactions to such stimuli will not be slowed. In the experiment, participants (N = 32) ignored the first names of other participants without problems, and they showed slowed reactions to such names that they had ignored shortly before (negative priming task). In contrast, no slowing was observed for participants’ own names when those names had just previously been used as distractors.