Abstract

Selective attention tasks require the selection of a target stimulus while a distractor is ignored. When the distractor is subsequently presented as the target subject's response time is slower than when no relationship between current target and preceding distractor exists, this is termed the negative priming effect. This review aims to examine the factors which influence negative priming and to contrast theoretical approaches on the main empirical data, in order to clarify the existing evidence for Inhibition models, Episodic Retrieval based models and Mismatching models which currently are the most influential theories on negative priming.