Negative priming from ignored distractors in visual selection: A review

The negative priming effect: inhibitory priming by ignored objects.

Selective attention versus selection for action: negative priming is not the result of distractors being unattended.

Using a novel referent size-selection task, MacDonald, Joordens, and Seergobin (1999; MacDonald & Joordens, 2000) found that negative priming persisted even when participants were encouraged to attend to distractors before selectively responding to targets. This finding suggested that negative priming is not caused by processes that operate on stimuli that are to be ignored in the traditional s...

Negative Priming in a Joint Selection Task

Recent studies have suggested that the observation of another individual executing a movement activates representations of the observed movement in the observer. These representations are thought to be used by other systems to facilitate a variety of social cognitive processes, such as social searches. Previous research on social searches has primarily involved contexts where targets were prese...

Negative versus positive priming: When are distractors inhibited?

Visual attention is guided not only by top-down and bottom-up factors, such as task demands or visual saliency, but also by the history of previous selections. Attention is deployed with higher likelihood to stimuli that share features with those previously attended to. In visual search, this is most evident from the effects of recent search trials on the current one: Finding a target on a curr...

Negative priming effects that are bigger than a breadbox: attention to distractors does not eliminate negative priming, it enhances it.

In a series of experiments, we examined the effect of requiring subjects to attend to distractors in a test of negative priming. This was accomplished by using a referent size-selection task in which subjects were instructed to name the larger animal and to ignore the smaller animal in a word pair. The result was a quadrupling of the standard negative priming effect, suggesting that negative pr...