Is negative priming a reliable measure for studying individual differencesin inhibition?

Inhibition has become the prominent explanation for individual differences in cognitive processes. However, almost nothing is known about the psychome tric properties of the most frequently used measure of inhibition: the nega tive priming effect. In this paper, we report on two experiments aimed at e valuating the reliability of four negative priming measures. The first expe riment was conducted on a sample of 36 university students who completed th ree tasks: an identification task, a localization task and a new task adapt ed from Navon's paradigm. None of the negative priming measures exhibited s ufficient reliability. These results were replicated on a larger sample of participants whose ages ranged between 30 and 80 years with a negative prim ing measure being based on the Stroop task. In this second experiment, the negative priming effect again appeared to be unreliable whilst the reliabil ity of an interference index was good.