Response conflict reverses priming: a replication

Subjects named target words that followed a masked prime word of 33-msec (Experiments 1A and 1B) or 200-msec (Experiment 2) duration. The target word was either presented alone or accompanied by an interleaved distractor word. Targets presented alone were named more quickly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (repetition priming). In Experiment 1A, targets with distractors were named more slowly following an identical prime than following an unrelated prime (negative priming), replicating Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seiffert (Psychological Review, 1998). In Experiments 1B and 2, repetition priming was reduced, although not reversed, for targets with distractors. The results of all three experiments are opposite to the usual finding of enhanced priming for perceptually degraded targets and suggest that response conflict engages retrospective mechanisms that counteract the facilitatory effects of priming.