Event-related evoked potential study of repetition priming to attended and unattended words

The filtering stage of ignored stimuli is one of main issues in the selective attention mechanism. We investigated whether unattended ignored stimuli show repetition priming effects on event-related brain potentials (ERPs), using a lexical decision task involving Japanese Kanji words. The repeated words in the unattended field generated a negative shift of the ERP over the frontal scalp sites. This suggested that unattended stimuli were processed implicitly to some degree and that different neural mechanisms contribute to repetition priming effects to attended and unattended stimuli.