Sumner Petroc
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, Park Place, Cardiff, UK.
Exp Psychol. 2008;55(2):133-41. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169.55.2.133.
Under certain conditions, masked primes have produced counter-intuitive negative compatibility effects (NCE), such that RT is increased, not decreased, when the target is similar to the prime. This NCE has been interpreted as an index of automatic motor inhibition, triggered to suppress the partial motor activation caused by the prime. An alternative explanation is that perceptual interactions between prime and mask produce positive priming in the opposite direction to the prime, explaining the NCE without postulating inhibition. Here the potential role of this "mask-induced priming" was investigated in two experiments, using masks composed of random lines. Experiment 1 compared masks that included features of the primes and targets with masks that did not. The former should create more mask-induced priming, but the NCE did not differ between masks. Experiment 2 employed masks that contained features of either one target or the other, but not both. These asymmetric masks produced significant mask-induced priming, but it was insufficient in size to account for the prime-related NCE. Thus mask composition can contribute to NCEs, but when random line masks are employed, the major source of the NCE seems to be motor-inhibition.
在某些条件下，掩蔽启动刺激会产生违反直觉的负兼容性效应（NCE），即当目标与启动刺激相似时，反应时会增加而非减少。这种NCE被解释为自动运动抑制的指标，被触发以抑制由启动刺激引起的部分运动激活。另一种解释是，启动刺激与掩蔽刺激之间的知觉相互作用会产生与启动刺激方向相反的正启动效应，从而在不假定抑制的情况下解释了NCE。在此，使用由随机线条组成的掩蔽刺激，通过两个实验研究了这种“掩蔽诱导启动效应”的潜在作用。实验1比较了包含启动刺激和目标特征的掩蔽刺激与不包含这些特征的掩蔽刺激。前者应该会产生更多的掩蔽诱导启动效应，但两种掩蔽刺激之间的NCE没有差异。实验2使用了只包含一个目标特征而非两个目标特征的掩蔽刺激。这些不对称掩蔽刺激产生了显著的掩蔽诱导启动效应，但效应大小不足以解释与启动刺激相关的NCE。因此，掩蔽刺激的组成可以对NCE产生影响，但当使用随机线条掩蔽刺激时，NCE的主要来源似乎是运动抑制。
