Cognitive inhibition in selection and sequential retrieval

Inhibitory models of working memory efficiency (Engle, 1996; Zacks & Rasher , 1994) assert that individual differences in working memory reflect the ef ficiency of inhibitory processes that exclude irrelevant information and su ppress no-longer-relevant information. The present study examined the impli cation that these two inhibitory processes operate at consistent levels of efficiency within individuals by examining the correlation between two cogn itive inhibition effects, negative priming and negative error priming. Nega tive priming involves slower response to a probe-trial target that was used as a to-be-ignored distracter on the immediately preceding prime trial. Ne gative error priming is the phenomenon that errors in a sequence of simple arithmetic trials are unlikely to involve the correct answer to the precedi ng problem. Participants received distracter-target pairs of simple additio n problems and were required to produce the target problem sum. Negative pr iming was observed for prime distracters, whereas negative error priming wa s observed in connection with previous targets but not distracters. Consist ent with the assumptions of these working memory models, the magnitudes of the two effects were significantly correlated.