Brain-Electrical Correlates of Negative Priming

Abstract

Over the past three decades research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has lead to important advances in the study of human attention (for a review, see Luck, Woodman, & Vogel, 2000). The list of well-known examples includes, among many other things, the operating of attention at early stages of selection (Hillyard, Hink, Schwent, & Picton, 1973), the factors eliciting early selective attention (Luck & Hillyard, 1999), the functional analysis of attentional networks (Posner & Petersen, 1990), and the controlled and automatic aspects of auditory match and mismatch (Naatanen, 1992). This special issue follows the tradition of using ERPs as a means to develop further the insight into attentional mechanisms. If one object is selectively attended, distracting objects must be ignored. It has been known for quite some time that ignoring a distracting object leaves processing traces that can be measured in participants’ behavior at some point later in time. Specifically, reactions to recently ignored objects are slower and typically also more errorprone than reactions to novel objects (Dalrymple-Alford & Budayr, 1966), which is why “negative priming” has evolved as the term representing the behavioral consequences of ignoring. These behavioral consequences of ignoring are extremely robust. They can be observed with stimuli as diverse as simple geometric shapes (Yee, 1991), line drawings of objects (Tipper, 1985), photographs of faces (Buchner, Steffens, & Berry, 2000), written letters (Neumann & DeSchepper, 1991), written words (Rothermund, Wentura, & De Houwer, 2005), spoken words (Banks, Roberts, & Ciranni, 1995), animal sounds (Mayr & Buchner, in press), instrument sounds (Buchner & Mayr, 2004) and even across the visual and auditory modalities (Buchner, Zabal, & Mayr, 2003; Driver & Baylis, 1993). In fact, research on the behavioral consequences of ignoring an object has become so numerous and so diverse that the customarily cited reviews (most often Fox, 1995; May, Kane, & Hasher, 1995; Neill, Valdes, & Terry, 1995; Tipper, 2001) have ceased being adequate for characterizing the field. Despite the abundance of experimental evidence pertaining to the behavioral consequences of ignoring, hardly anything seems to have been published about the concurrent brain-electrical correlates of ignoring. In fact, this empirical gap in our understanding of the negative priming phenomenon began to be closed only recently (Kathmann, Bogdahn, & Endrass, 2006; Mayr, Niedeggen, Buchner, & Pietrowsky, 2003). The apparent gap has also stimulated the current special issue on brain-electrical correlates of negative priming, the more so as one may hope that this research may help deciding which theory best explains the negative priming phenomenon by enabling us to look beyond mere reaction times and error rates using a high temporal resolution research tool. Needless to say, the experimental work collected here is just about as diverse as the rest of the negative priming literature. The contribution by Ruge and Naumann is based on a spatial negative priming task. In this task, participants report the location of a target object while ignoring a distractor object. The typical slowdown in reactions and increase in error rates are observed when the target object appears at the location at which a distractor was presented on the preceding trial, that is, when the previous distractor location (the prime distractor location) becomes the subsequent target location (the probe distractor location). When compared to a control condition with no overlap of prime and probe locations, this condition was characterized by a lower-amplitude N1 and an enhanced-amplitude N2pc, both contralateral to the visual half-field of the target location, and a posteriorly distributed enhanced-amplitude N2 without lateralization. Ruge and Naumann interpret their findings as evidence in favor of a variant of a distractor inhibition account of negative priming. According to the distractor inhibition account (Houghton & Tipper, 1994; Neill, 1977; Tipper, 1985), negative priming reflects the operation of an attentional selection mechanism that prevents access of ignored objects to overt responses by suppressing competing distractor input. This mechanism enables more efficient responding to the current target, but causes a delay in responding when the previously ignored (and, hence, inhibited) distractor becomes the new target. Neill and colleagues (Neill & Valdes, 1992; Neill, Valdes, Terry, & Gorfein, 1992) later argued that a © 2006 Federation of European Psychophysiology Societies