Abstract
Negative priming effects have been offered as evidence that distractor stimuli are identified. We conducted two experiments to determine if such effects occur even when it is easy to discriminate target from distractor stimuli. In Experiment 1, we found the usual negative priming effect when target and distractor positions varied from trial to trial, but not when these positions remained fixed. Experiment 2 extended these results to a situation where the ease of selection varied only in the prime display. These findings argue that irrelevant inputs can be filtered out prior to stimulus identification under certain circumstances and therefore pose problems for strict late selection theories.
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During the course of this research, the first author received support from a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and Public Health Service Training Grant 2T32-MH14268. The research was also supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant PHS-40733.
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Ruthruff, E., Miller, J. Negative priming depends on ease of selection. Perception & Psychophysics 57, 715–723 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213275
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213275