Long-term positive and negative identity priming: evidence for episodic retrieval

An episodic retrieval account of negative priming (Neill, 1997; Neill & Valdes, 1992) was evaluated in three experiments. During practice, regular word pairs were presented to subjects differing numbers of times. The subjects named specific target words while they ignored specific distractor words. Following a 5-min retention interval, memory for practice was revealed: Test responses for target words exhibited positive priming that increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been attended. Test responses for distractor words exhibited either positive priming (Experiment 1) or negative priming (Experiments 2-3) that also increased with increases in the number of times that the words had been ignored. The type of priming that distractors exhibited was determined by several contextual similarities between the practice environment, in which distractors were ignored initially, and the test environments, in which they were processed subsequently. Negative priming that spanned a 5-min interval, increased with increases in the number of times that a distractor was ignored, and was sensitive to contextual changes indicated that the direction of the effect was temporally backward because the test probe cued memory for earlier processing of the priming stimulus when the distractor had been ignored.