Attending, ignoring, and repetition: On the relation between negative priming and inhibition of return

Abstract

Aseries of spatial localization experiments is reported that addresses the relation between negative priming and inhibition ofreturn. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that slowed responses to repeated location stimuli can be obscured by repetition priming effects involvingstimulus dimensions other than spatial location. The results of Experiments 2, 3A,and 3B demonstrate that these repetition priming effects may occur onlywhen participants are required to respond to the prime display.Together, these results suggest that differences between attended and ignored repetition effects in selective attention studies of spatial localization do not provide a basis for distinguishing between spatial negative priming and inhibition of return.Repeating an action often increases its efficiency. The benefit of repetition is obvious in the learning of new skills but also can be observed under experimental conditions that tap highly practiced skills, such as word identification (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977). The term repetition priming is often used to describe the wide array of such effects that have been observed in the laboratory.Because practicing a complex behavior so reliably results in learning and because repetition benefits are so commonly observed in the laboratory, researchers have made special note of each of a variety of experimental conditions that produce the opposite result. This article focuses on the relation between two empirical phenomena that measure repetition costs: negative priming (Tipper, 1985) and inhibition of return . The proposal forwarded in this article is that negative priming and inhibition of return may be determined by the same cause but are often attributed to different causes for reasons related to experimental procedure. Specifically, negative priming is commonly measured with a procedure in which the participant attends to a target and ignores a distractor in two consecutive displays. Consequently, negative priming is thought to reflect a process that is engaged specifically to solve a selective attention problem. By contrast, inhibition of return is not measured with a selective attention procedure. If negative priming measures a process that is related specifically to selective attention, inhibition of return cannot possibly measure the same process(es).On the other hand, if negative priming is not caused by processes that are specific to selective attention tasks, inhibition ofreturn and negative priming could conceivably measure the same process(es). Indeed, the experiments reported here demonstrate that negative priming in spatial localization tasks does not depend on selective attention task demands. Furthermore, the results suggest that selective attention demands in a negative priming task can produce an effect that masks an underlying similarity between negative priming and inhibition of return. The theoretical implications of these results are addressed in the General Discussion section. The remainder of the introduction sets the resear...

The adaptive character of the attentional system: Statistical sensitivity in a target localization task.

“…The IOR account (Christie & Klein, 2001;Milliken et al, 2000) is also partially consistent with our results. Christie and Klein found that negative priming could be explained by IOR when everything else was perfectly balanced.…”

Dorsal and Ventral Parietal Contributions to Spatial Orienting in the Human Brain

“…TPJ may be specifically important for the detection of novel and behaviorally relevant stimuli (Asplund et al, 2010). A fundamental mechanism contributing to IOR is the relative lack of novelty of a target appearing at the same location of a previously presented cue, separated by long SOA (Milliken et al, 2000). IOR could be caused by a "habituation" of the orienting response some time after the cue has been presented (Milliken et al, 2000;Dukewich, 2009).…”

“…A fundamental mechanism contributing to IOR is the relative lack of novelty of a target appearing at the same location of a previously presented cue, separated by long SOA (Milliken et al, 2000). IOR could be caused by a "habituation" of the orienting response some time after the cue has been presented (Milliken et al, 2000;Dukewich, 2009). Such a phenomenon would bias attention toward locations that have not been previously attended or explored.…”

Retrieval of implicit inhibitory processes: The impact of visual field, object-identity, and memory dynamics

“…For example, Deschepper and Treisman (1998) Houghton & Tipper, 1994;Milliken Tipper, Houghton, & Lupianez, 2000) that similar processes mediate the inhibitory effects observed via cueing (e.g., IOR) and priming (e.g., negative priming). Therefore one might predict that retrieval of prior inhibitory states might be observed in both procedures.…”