[Does negative priming occur by rotated characters?]

We conducted three experiments in order to investigate the effect of stimulus orientation on negative priming (NP). Using the picture naming task, Murray (1995) reported the occurrence of semantic NP by rotated distractors. As the rotation of picture stimuli seems to have little effect to reduce distractor interference, in the present study we used the character (katakana) identification task to ensure the effect of stimulus rotation. When the distractors were rotated (180 degrees), no NP was observed whether the targets were upright (Experiment 1) or rotated (Experiment 2). On the other hand, significant NP was observed when the distractors were upright and the targets were rotated (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the inhibitory mechanism of attention may not operate on the rotated distractor characters.