NEGATIVE PRIMING, ATTENTION, AND DISCRIMINATING THE PRESENT FROM THE PAST

Priming effects have been used widely as a tool to study attentional p rocesses. However, inferences regarding attention depend on how primin g effects are interpreted. in the case of negative priming, an activat ion-based framework for interpreting priming suggests that attention i nhibits the representation of prime distracters and that this inhibiti on is measured in performance to subsequent probes, Data summarized in this article point out that negative priming does not depend on selec tion of one of two primes and that attentional influences during retri eval play an important role in determining negative priming, Also, two experiments are described that demonstrate a correlation between prim ing effects and knowledge of the relation between primes and probes. W e suggest that negative priming is not determined directly by a proces s of ignoring, but instead occurs because a repeated probe is less tem porally distinct when ignored as a prime than when attended. (C) 1997 Academic Press.