Ellinghaus Ruben, Miller Jeff
Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstraße 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 90654, New Zealand.
Psychol Res. 2018 May;82(3):590-599. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0844-z. Epub 2017 Mar 1.
Delta plots with negative-going slopes (nDPs) reflect the phenomenon that an RT difference between two conditions is greater for relatively fast than for relatively slow responses. This unusual distributional pattern has predominantly been observed in the spatial Simon task, where it has been interpreted as reflecting the selective inhibition of an automatically activated response. The literature suggesting that a similar fading mechanism influences RTs in masked identity priming inspired us to check an analogous semantic priming paradigm for nDPs. Consistent with the findings in other paradigms, two masked semantic priming experiments revealed stronger priming effects for relatively fast than for relatively slow responses, thus reflecting an nDP. These findings are compatible with the ideas that the activation produced by masked semantic primes decreases over the course of a trial, such as that of irrelevant spatial information and of masked identity primes, and that nDPs are a general signature of within-trial decreases in response activation across different tasks and paradigms.
具有负斜率的增量图（nDPs）反映了这样一种现象：两种条件下的反应时差异在相对快速反应中比在相对慢速反应中更大。这种不寻常的分布模式主要在空间西蒙任务中观察到，在该任务中它被解释为反映了对自动激活反应的选择性抑制。有文献表明，类似的消退机制会影响掩蔽身份启动中的反应时，这促使我们在类似的语义启动范式中检查nDPs。与其他范式的研究结果一致，两项掩蔽语义启动实验表明，相对快速反应的启动效应强于相对慢速反应，从而反映出一个nDP。这些发现与以下观点相符：掩蔽语义启动产生的激活在试验过程中会降低，就像无关空间信息和掩蔽身份启动那样，并且nDPs是不同任务和范式中反应激活在试验内降低的一个普遍特征。
