Negative priming and multiple repetition: A reply to Grison and Strayer (2001)

Strayer and colleagues (Grison & Strayer, 2001; Malley & Strayer, 1995; Strayer & Grison, 1999) have reported experiments in which negative priming by ignored stimuli occurred only for stimuli that were repeatedly sampled from small sets. These results were argued to be inconsistent with episodic/mismatch accounts of negative priming. We show here that a dependence of negative priming on multiple repetition is wholly consistent with such theories. Furthermore, we argue that the inhibitory theory proposed by Strayer and colleagues cannot account for major findings regarding negative priming and that anomalies in the data reported by Grison and Strayer are more parsimoniously explained by episodic/mismatch accounts.