NEGATIVE PRIMING BY ROTATED OBJECTS

Previous work has found that repeated exposure to ignored rotated obje cts is insufficient to allow the formation of orientation-invariant re presentations (Murray, 1995b). In this study, the negative priming par adigm was used to examine whether the identity of ignored rotated obje cts was encoded. Subjects were briefly presented with a prime followed by a probe display. One of the two overlapping drawings of objects in each display was selected for further processing, and the other was i gnored. In one condition, the ignored objects were upright; in another , they were rotated 240 degrees; and in a final condition, subjects re peatedly named the 240 degrees objects prior to experiencing them as i gnored objects in the priming task. Naming latency for the attended pr obe was slower when it was semantically related to the ignored prime i n all conditions. The results suggest that unattended rotated objects are processed to a level of representation that is at least categorica l.