A neural habituation account of the negative compatibility effect.

Abstract

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is the finding of slower reaction times (RTs) to report the direction of a target arrow following a subliminal prime arrow pointed in the same direction. The NCE is commonly thought to reflect automatic response inhibition, and on this assumption, it has recently been used to assess various motor disorders. Here we propose a fundamentally different account of the NCE: one that relates the NCE to a broader class of paradigms that reveal behavioral deficits with repetition priming. We propose that the NCE is a "cognitive aftereffect," as explained with the neural habituation model of Huber and O'Reilly (2003). To identify the underlying perceptual dynamics by reducing the role of response preparation, we developed a novel variant of the NCE task with threshold accuracy rather than RT as the dependent measure. This revealed a transition from positive to negative priming as a function of prime duration, and a second experiment ruled out response priming. The perceptual dynamics of the neural habituation model were fit to these results and then fixed in applying the model to the NCE literature. Application of the model to RTs added a response layer that accumulates response information throughout the trial. With this addition, the model captured results found in the NCE literature that are inconsistent with a response inhibition account. Situations that produce a positive compatibility effect, rather than an NCE, were explained as response priming, whereas NCE effects were explained as a cognitive aftereffect, rooted in perceptual dynamics.

Increasing the duration of an intervening distractor word can increase repetition blindness: Evidence for interitem competition in rapid visual sequences.

“…Arguably, they reflect the smaller increase in C1 duration (48 ms) relative to the increases of up to several hundred milliseconds in other studies, together with insufficient power to detect a small effect. However, Luo and Caramazza (with single-letter targets) observed a decrease in C2 accuracy when C1 duration increased from 25 to 50 ms. Also, in the negative compatibility paradigm, in which the identification of arrow targets is impaired by arrow primes when they share the target direction, Jacob et al (2021) found a shift to a detrimental repetition effect when the prime duration was increased from 34 to 68 ms. The present results support the alternative explanation that the effect of C1 duration in previous studies (Burt et al, 2014; Huber, 2008; Luo & Caramazza, 1995) arose largely because there was no intervening item between C1 and C2.…”

“…As noted previously, distractor duration effects are not consistent with current theories of RB, given that the burden of explanation for RB falls on the processing of C1. A possible exception is the refractoriness model, which predicts a continued increase in refractoriness up to approximately 100 ms after C1 offset when C1 is followed by a mask or blank interval (Jacob et al, 2021). However, given the processing demands of a word, it appears unlikely that this result would generalise to the present case of a word distractor intervening between C1 and C2.…”