Negative priming is diminished under high blood pressure in healthy subjects.

Abstract

The ability to ignore distracting objects is a core mechanism in selective attention and has been analyzed particularly with respect to its clinical implications (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, or unhealthy life-style). Here, we investigated the correlation between an established experimental task to measure distractor-processing and participants' blood pressure. We used the negative priming (NP) task in which participants show worse performance to target stimuli that were distractors in the previous trial. Notably, our participants were all healthy, young subjects but nevertheless we observed a correlation between blood pressure levels and NP effects, the higher the blood pressure the less NP was shown by participants. Our results suggest that processes modulated by higher blood pressure diminish the ability to successful ignore distracting objects not only at hypertension levels.