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Updated: Jun 26, 2026
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Irrelevant Stimuli and Action Control: Analyzing the Influence of Ignored Stimuli via the Distractor-Response Binding Paradigm
Published on: May 14, 2014
No evidence for a cue mismatch in negative priming
Susanne Mayr1, Robert Hauke, Axel Buchner
1Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, Germany. susanne.mayr@uni-duesseldorf.de
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|January 6, 2009
Summary
The cue mismatch hypothesis for negative priming was disproven. Negative priming effects did not differ between conditions, supporting episodic retrieval accounts instead.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Experimental psychology
Background:
- Negative priming is a phenomenon where repeated exposure to ignored stimuli slows subsequent responses.
- The cue mismatch hypothesis proposed a novel explanation for negative priming based on feature-selection cues.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally test the cue mismatch hypothesis of negative priming.
- To compare negative priming effects under cue mismatch and no mismatch conditions.
Main Methods:
- A visual discrimination task was employed, contrasting a cue mismatch condition with a no mismatch condition.
- In the cue mismatch condition, prime distractor color differed from the selection cue color.
- In the no mismatch condition, the visual cue was always neutral (black).
Main Results:
- Contrary to predictions, the negative priming effect was not significantly larger in the cue mismatch condition compared to the no mismatch condition.
- The results did not support the cue mismatch hypothesis.
Conclusions:
- The cue mismatch hypothesis, a variant of mismatching hypotheses, is rejected based on the experimental findings.
- The results are consistent with the episodic retrieval account of negative priming.
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