Abstract
Subjects named target words that followed a masked prime word of 33-msec (Experiments 1A and 1B) or 200-msec (Experiment 2) duration. The target word was either presented alone or accompanied by an interleaved distractor word. Targets presented alone were named more quickly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (repetition priming). In Experiment 1A, targets with distractors were named more slowly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (negative priming), replicating Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seiffert (Psychological Review, 1998). In Experiments 1B and 2, repetition priming was reduced, although not reversed, for targets with distractors. The results of all three experiments are opposite to the usual finding of enhanced priming for perceptually degraded targets and suggest that response conflict engages retrospective mechanisms that counteract the facilitatory effects of priming.
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Portions of this research were presented at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, November 1996. We are indebted to Maria Cianciulli, Heather Clark, Jennifer Hein, and Christopher Nuzzi for assistance with data collection. We are also grateful to Bruce Milliken, Michael Kane, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on our initial manuscript.
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Neill, W.T., Kahan, T.A. Response conflict reverses priming: A replication. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6, 304–308 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212334
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212334