Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, Department of Psychology, Building A24, P.O. Box 15 11 50, D-66041 Saarbrücken.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2011 Feb;37(1):72-84. doi: 10.1037/a0020673.
Negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that people's responses to probe targets previously presented as prime distractors are usually slower and more error prone than to unrepeated stimuli. In a typical NP experiment, each probe target is accompanied by a distractor. It is an accepted, albeit puzzling, finding that the NP effect depends on the presence of these probe distractors; for, without probe distractors, NP diminishes. This phenomenon causes severe problems for the majority of theoretical accounts of NP. In the present study, we follow a simple argument, namely that without probe distractors, the difficulty of responding to the probe is so low that NP becomes irrelevant. Hence, by increasing perceptual processing difficulty, as well as by increasing conceptual processing difficulty, significant NP effects with constantly absent probe distractors can be reliably observed. In addition, our results also show that NP without probe distractors can be found by exclusively manipulating probe display processing. This finding furthers our understanding of the processes causing NP.
负启动（NP）是指这样一种发现，即人们对先前作为启动分心物呈现的探针目标的反应通常比未重复的刺激更慢且更容易出错。在典型的 NP 实验中，每个探针目标都伴随着一个分心物。虽然令人费解，但被普遍接受的是，NP 效应取决于这些探针分心物的存在；因为，如果没有探针分心物，NP 就会减少。这一现象给 NP 的大多数理论解释带来了严重的问题。在本研究中，我们遵循一个简单的论点，即如果没有探针分心物，那么对探针的反应难度就会非常低，以至于 NP 变得无关紧要。因此，通过增加知觉加工难度以及增加概念加工难度，可以可靠地观察到即使探针分心物始终不存在，也能产生显著的 NP 效应。此外，我们的结果还表明，通过专门操纵探针显示处理，也可以找到没有探针分心物的 NP。这一发现进一步加深了我们对导致 NP 的过程的理解。
