Neill W Trammell, Kleinsmith Abigail L
Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, 12222, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2016 Nov;78(8):2411-2419. doi: 10.3758/s13414-016-1176-6.
In tasks requiring a response to the location of a target stimulus (for example, reaching), responses often are slower to a location that was recently occupied by an irrelevant distractor stimulus. In most demonstrations of this "spatial negative priming" (SNP), there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between possible stimulus locations and possible responses. As such, it is ambiguous whether the effect is due to a location-specific processing delay or to inhibition of a response. In the present experiment, subjects were required to press a key corresponding to the ordinal position of a target O in one of four locations, ignoring a distractor X appearing in another location. Location markers were widely or narrowly spaced, such that the inner two locations of wide displays corresponded to the outer two locations of narrow displays (hence, requiring different responses). SNP occurred when a target appeared at the location of a recent distractor, regardless of whether the response was associated with the distractor. In contrast, no SNP occurred for a target sharing the same response as a distractor, but in a different location. The results strongly support a location-specific, rather than response-specific, locus of SNP.
在需要对目标刺激的位置做出反应的任务中（例如伸手够物），对于最近被无关干扰刺激占据过的位置，反应往往会更慢。在大多数这种“空间负启动”（SNP）的演示中，可能的刺激位置和可能的反应之间存在一一对应关系。因此，这种效应是由于特定位置的加工延迟还是反应抑制并不明确。在本实验中，要求受试者按下与目标字母O在四个位置之一的顺序位置相对应的按键，忽略出现在另一个位置的干扰字母X。位置标记的间距有宽有窄，使得宽显示屏的中间两个位置对应窄显示屏的外侧两个位置（因此，需要不同的反应）。当目标出现在最近干扰物的位置时，就会出现SNP，无论该反应是否与干扰物相关。相比之下，对于与干扰物有相同反应但位置不同的目标，未出现SNP。结果有力地支持了SNP的特定位置而非特定反应的位点。
