Revisiting the role of probe distractors in negative priming: Location negative priming is observed when probe distractors are consistently absent

Negative priming (NP) refers to the delayed response to a probe target that was previously a prime distractor. One peculiar problem in NP literature is the observation that the manifestation of identity NP is contingent on the presence and type of probe distractors. When the probe distractors were completely removed, positive priming, rather than NP, was usually observed. This study investigated whether location NP was affected by the same manipulations. The proportion of ignored repetition trials, attended repetition trials, and control trials was manipulated across Experiments 1–3. These three experiments showed reliable location NP effect when the probe distractor was consistently absent. Experiment 4 showed that the presence of probe distractors did not increase the magnitude of the location NP effect. Experiment 5 showed that the location NP effect observed was not contingent on perceptual mismatching. These findings suggest that the presence of probe distractors is not a necessary component for the manifestation of location NP. Theoretical implications were discussed.