Suppression of irrelevant location information by individuals with and without mental retardation

Negative priming in a location task was examined for individuals with and without mental retardation. In each prime display, a target stimulus was presented in one of four locations, with a distractor stimulus appearing in another location. The target in the probe appeared either in the same position as the target in the prime, the same position as the distractor, or a different position from both. In contrast to results obtained using identification tasks (Cha & Merrill, 1994), all subjects exhibited interference to locating the target in the negative priming condition. All individuals apparently actively suppressed response tendencies to the location of irrelevant information in the prime display.