NEGATIVE PRIMING FROM IGNORED DISTRACTORS IN VISUAL SELECTION - A REVIEW

Ignoring a distracter on a prime trial generally impairs responses to that object on a subsequent probe trial. This negative-priming (NP) ef fect supports the notion that distracting objects are actively inhibit ed during target selection (Tipper, 1985). Alternatively NP may be cau sed either by a mismatch between the features of items across prime an d probe trials (Park & Kanwisher, 1994) or by the episodic retrieval o f information from the prime trial which conflicts with the current, c orrect response (Neill & Valdes, 1992). These alternative accounts are called the selective inhibition, feature mismatching, and episodic re trieval hypotheses, respectively The present paper reviews the NP lite rature and considers the evidence for each of the three accounts. Feat ure mismatching does produce NP in a limited number of cases, but it i s not a necessary condition for NP. In other cases, NP must be due to either selective inhibition or episodic retrieval of previously ignore d distracters. Though results from critical tests designed to discrimi nate among these hypotheses have not yet been reported, such results a re crucial for both theoretical and practical reasons.