Negative Priming Experiment

Priming

Priming refers to the influence of a previously encountered stimulus on the processing of a later one. Prior exposure can speed responses (positive priming) or slow them (negative priming), depending on whether the stimulus was responded to or ignored.

• Positive priming: responding to a stimulus facilitates its later processing.
• Negative priming: ignoring a stimulus as a distractor slows later responses to that same stimulus.
• Both effects are measured as reaction-time differences between controlled conditions, not as single absolute scores.

Negative Priming

Negative priming is observed when a previously ignored stimulus (a distractor) reappears as the target: responses to it are typically slower — and sometimes less accurate — than responses to stimuli that were not recently present.

• It is a benchmark phenomenon for selective attention: ignored information is actively processed, not simply filtered out.
• Competing accounts describe it as temporary inhibition of distractor responses or as episodic retrieval of 'do-not-respond' tags; the debate is unresolved.
• It has been studied in relation to aging, schizophrenia, and attention deficits — as research indices, not as diagnostic tools.

References

• Tipper, S. P. (1985). The negative priming effect: Inhibitory priming by ignored objects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 37A(4), 571-590. 10.1080/14640748508400920
• Dalrymple-Alford, E.C. & Budayr, B. (1966). Examination of some aspects of the Stroop color word test. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 23, 1211-1214.
• Frings, C., Schneider, K.K., and Fox, E. (2015). The negative priming paradigm: An update and implications for selective attention. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(6), 1577-1597.
• Mayr, S. & Buchner, A. (2007). Negative Priming as a Memory Phenomenon. Journal of Psychology, 215(1), 35-51.