Abstract
The present study investigated whether semantic negative priming from single prime words depends on the availability of cognitive control resources. Participants with high vs. low working memory capacity (as assessed by their performance in complex span and attentional control tasks) were instructed to either attend to or ignore a briefly presented single prime word that was followed by either a semantically related or unrelated target word on which participants made a lexical decision. Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) mainly affected the processing of the ignored primes, but not the processing of the attended primes: While the latter produced reliable positive semantic priming for both high- and low-WMC participants, the former gave rise to reliable semantic negative priming only for high WMC participants, with low WMC participants showing the opposite positive priming effect. The present results extend previous findings in demonstrating that (a) single negative priming can reliably generalize to semantic associates of the prime words, and (b) a differential availability of cognitive control resources can reliably modulate the negative priming effect at a semantic level of representation.
Highlights
Selection of a relevant stimulus from among competing irrelevant stimuli is a core cognitive ability
The YES cue gave rise to reliable semantic positive priming (PP), while the NO cue produced reliable semantic Negative Priming (NP), regardless of whether the probe target was presented with or without distractors. Apart from replicating this pattern of results, the main goal of the current work was to explore whether semantic NP from ignored words depends on the availability of cognitive control resources
The differential performance of the two working memory capacity (WMC) groups does not reflect a generalized performance deficit in low- compared with high-WMC subjects, such as lack of attention or slower processing-speed
Summary
Selection of a relevant stimulus from among competing irrelevant stimuli is a core cognitive ability. An influential paradigm in cognitive psychology that was originally developed to measure attentional selection is that of Negative Priming (NP). NP is typically observed in selective attention tasks that present target stimuli among distractors in two consecutive displays (the first called the prime display and the second called the probe display). Unlike some other selection tasks (e.g., Stroop, Working Memory and Negative Priming flanker tasks), the NP task allows investigation of the fate of the representation of previously encountered but ignored stimuli. Further work has reported reliable NP even in the absence of distractor stimuli on the prime display (i.e., single-NP; e.g., Milliken et al, 1998; Frings and Wentura, 2005; Noguera et al, 2007, 2015; Chao and Yeh, 2008)
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