Similarities in negative priming between persons with and those without mental retardation of equal chronological age

Adolescents with and those without mental retardation participated in a negative priming procedure in two experiments. They identified letters to stimulus displays presented in pairs. Negative priming was observed as the slowing of response times when the distractor in the first display (prime) became the target in the second display (probe). In the standard procedure, all displays include one target and one distractor. In our modification, prime displays occasionally included a distractor without a target. Although adolescents with mental retardation typically do not exhibit negative priming when responding on the basis of stimulus identity, they did so with single letter primes in these experiments.