Response priming refers to the finding that a prime stimulus preceding a target stimulus influences the response to the following target stimulus. Typically, responses are faster and more accurate if the prime calls for the same response as the target (i.e., compatible trials), as compared with the situation where primes and targets trigger different responses (i.e., incompatible trials). However, the effect depends on presentational and temporal parameters such as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of prime and target, or prime duration. Until now, the special role of moving stimuli was largely ignored. In the present research, experiments were conducted using clearly visible moving dots as primes and static arrows as targets. Essentially, with short SOAs up to 200 ms, participants responded faster to compatible targets. In contrast, with SOAs above 200 ms, participants responded faster to incompatible targets. The results were compared with response priming with static primes. Here, a different pattern of results emerged, with faster responses to compatible than incompatible targets at a long SOA of 300 ms. Overall, the experiments provide evidence for the existence of an inhibitory mechanism in action control when (distracting) motion stimuli are present. Results could be explained with slight changes to different accounts of negative response priming effects, as well as theories of attention.

The emotional Stroop effect refers to the phenomenon that participants are faster in responding to the ink colour of neutral than of negative word stimuli, possibly reflecting fast and automatic allocation of attention towards negative stimuli. However, this interpretation was challenged by McKenna and Sharma (2004) who found that the emotional Stroop effect reflected a generic slowdown after negative stimuli. In fact, they even found reversed effects in a design in which neutral stimuli more often followed negative stimuli and vice versa. Yet, besides reversing the emotional Stroop effect this contingency might in fact have counteracted the fast effect, which was usually interpreted as the emotional Stroop effect. To decompose the emotional Stroop effect we used a design in which the foregoing and the current valence were uncorrelated and in which the fast and slow effects could be computed independently from each other. We found evidence for both fast and slow effects and discuss the practical implications for researchers using the emotional Stroop task as a measurement and the theoretical implications for researchers interested in the underlying cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the emotional Stroop effect.

There is a long-lasting debate on whether subliminal advertising actually works. In this context there are some studies suggesting that subjects’ motivation is a crucial point. Karremans et al. [Karremans, J. C., Stroebe, W., & Claus, J. (2006). Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 792–798] showed that subjects were influenced in their intention to drink a specific brand of soft drink by a subliminally presented brand prime, but only if they were thirsty. In the present study, we adapted their paradigm to the concept of ‘concentration’ and embedded the subliminal presentation of a brand logo into a computer game. Actual subsequent consumption of dextrose pills (of the presented or a not presented brand) was measured dependent on the level of participants’ tiredness and the subliminally presented logo. We found the same pattern as Karremans et al. (2006): only tired participants consumed more of the subliminally presented than the not presented brand. Therefore, the findings confirm that subjects are influenced by subliminally presented stimuli if these stimuli are need-related and if subjects are in the matching motivational state

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The dot-probe paradigm is one of the most often used paradigms to investigate attentional biases towards emotional information. However, a large number of the dot-probe studies so far used a long stimulus onset asynchrony allowing for eye movements to occur, which might increase the error variance. This study aimed at addressing this methodological issue by varying the instructions with regard to the gaze behavior and calculating the reaction time (RT) bias score (i.e., RTs for targets presented at the location of the emotional compared to the neutral stimulus) separately for trials with eye movements and trials without eye movements. Results of Experiment 1 (using typical instructions, i.e., instructions that are lenient with regard to eye movements) showed an RT bias, but only in the trials without eye movements The overall RT bias (calculated “blind” for eye movements) was non-significant. In Experiment 2, stricter instructions and small changes in the procedure led to a sharp decrease in the number of eye movements, such that both the RT bias in the trials without eye movements as well as the RT bias across all trials was significant.