Similarities in negative priming between persons with and those without mental retardation of equal chronological age

Adolescents with and those without mental retardation participated in a neg ative priming procedure in two experiments. They identified letters to stim ulus displays presented in pairs. Negative priming was observed as the slow ing of response times when the distracter in the first display (prime) beca me the target in the second display (probe). In the standard procedure, all displays include one target and one distracter. In our modification, prime displays occasionally included a distracter without a target. Although ado lescents with mental retardation typically do not exhibit negative priming when responding on the basis of stimulus identity, they did so with single letter primes in these experiments.