On distractor-repetition benefits in the negative-priming paradigm

VISUAL COGNITION, 2007, 15 (2), 166 178

On distractor-repetition benefits in the negative-priming paradigm Christian Frings Universita¨t des Saarlandes, Saarbru¨cken, Germany

Peter Wu¨hr Universita¨t Erlangen-Nu¨rnberg, Erlangen, Germany

The present study investigates the effects of distractor repetitions between prime and probe displays on behaviour in the negative-priming (NP) paradigm. Investigating this condition is theoretically significant because inhibition-based accounts and episodic retrieval accounts of NP on one side and the temporaldiscrimination theory on the other side make opposite predictions with regard to the effects of distractor repetition. In particular, the former accounts predict distractor-repetition benefits while the latter theory does not. Two experiments further explored the distractor-repetition effects. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings. Experiment 2 further showed that distractor-repetition benefits are still observed when the prime-display distractor and the probe-display target are not correlated. The pattern of results is consistent both with inhibition-based and with retrieval-based accounts of NP, but the results are inconsistent with temporaldiscrimination theory.

The relationship between subsequently presented stimulus displays can strongly modulate behaviour to the second display. If two subsequent target stimuli are identical responding to the second stimulus will often be facilitated (e.g., Durso & Johnson, 1979). This finding is called repetition priming (see Tenpenny, 1995, for a review). However, overlap between two subsequent displays is not always beneficial. If a to-be-ignored stimulus (distractor) from the preceding display becomes the target in the next display, then responding to this target will be impaired in terms of RT and in Please address all correspondence to Christian Frings, Saarland University, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Department of Psychology, Building A24, PO Box 15 11 50, D-66041 Saarbru¨cken, Germany. E-mail: [email protected] We thank Maike Holtz, Gisela Schmidt, Anna-Marie Arend, and Michael Kuhlmann for conducting the experiments. Moreover, we thank Tram Neill, Carrick Williams, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. # 2007 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business http://www.psypress.com/viscog DOI: 10.1080/13506280500475264

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terms of accuracy (Dalrymple-Alford & Budayr, 1966; Neill, 1977). This finding is called negative priming (Tipper, 1985). Negative priming (NP) is a robust finding, which has been found for a wide variety of different tasks, different stimuli, and different populations of participants (see, e.g., Neill & Valdes, 1996; Tipper, 2001, for reviews). The mechanisms underlying NP are still controversial. Prominent accounts of NP include inhibition theory (Houghton & Tipper, 1994; Tipper & Cranston, 1985) and episodic-retrieval theories (e.g., Neill, 1997; Neill & Mathis, 1998). Inhibition theory explains NP by assuming that the cognitive system (i.e., selective attention) actively suppresses the representation of the distractor stimulus during processing of the prime episode. When the ignored distractor from the previous trial becomes the target in the current trial (ignored-repetition condition) the recently inhibited representation must now be activated for responding and NP occurs. In contrast, retrieval theories argue that NP is caused by the fact that perceiving a target activates memory traces associated with that particular stimulus. In the ignoredrepetition condition, the last memory trace of the current target stimulus may contain information like ‘‘distractor’’ or ‘‘do-not-respond’’, and this information may interfere with responding quickly and accurately to the target. Both types of accounts are well supported from the literature, which led several authors to conclude that both inhibitory mechanisms and retrieval processes contribute to NP (Kane, May, Hasher, Rahhal, & Stoltzfus, 1997; Tipper, 2001). Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, and Seiffert (1998) introduced an alternative account of NP: The temporal-discrimination theory. At the core of this theory is an attention system that decides whether a response to a stimulus is already known and can be directly retrieved from memory, or whether a response to a stimulus is unknown and must be ‘‘computed’’ in a controlled mode of processing. Furthermore, it is assumed that the time needed for the attention system to decide whether a display is old (and a response is already known) or new (and a response is yet unknown) is a non-monotonic function of the match between the prime display and the probe display. In particular, if the target is repeated between prime and probe displays, then the attention system should quickly recognize the probe target as ‘‘old’’ and the response from the last trial is retrieved from memory. If nothing is repeated between prime and probe displays *the control condition *then the attention system rather quickly determines the probe target as ‘‘new’’, and a corresponding response is computed. Finally, if the prime distractor becomes the target in the probe display, the probe display contains both old and new information and this ambiguity is assumed to slow down the decision process. Milliken and colleagues attribute NP to this ambiguity in the ignored-repetition condition.

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Temporal-discrimination theory receives support from the finding that NP is also observed when a single, irrelevant prime stimulus precedes the probe episode. In their experiments, Milliken et al. (1998) briefly flashed single prime words, which were preceded and followed by a mask, before presenting the probe episode containing two words. Participants task was to focus attention on the masks and then to name the target word from the probe episode, which was designated by colour. When the prime and the target word were related, significant NP was observed. The authors interpreted this finding as evidence against the view that ‘‘selecting against’’ a prime distractor is a necessary condition for NP to occur. Yet these findings are consistent with temporal-discrimination theory because the brief presentation of prime words that are related to the subsequent target words should produce ambiguity regarding the decision of whether the probe target is old or new. Although Neill and Kahan (1999) failed to observe NP with single masked prime stimuli in their Experiment 1b, other researchers have obtained such effects and furthermore demonstrated that unawareness of the masked primes is a precondition for observing NP with these stimuli (Frings & Wentura, 2005; Healy & Burt, 2003). The purpose of the present study is to further investigate the effects of distractor repetition on performance to probe displays, and to reevaluate the theoretical significance of this finding. Only a few previous studies have investigated the effects of distractor repetition (e.g., Neumann & DeSchepper, 1991; Tipper, Bourque, Anderson, & Brehaut, 1989; Tipper & Cranston, 1985). These studies observed that the repetition of the distractor produced a small, but robust benefit in reaction times of 7 8 ms (cf. Neumann & DeSchepper, 1991). Yet most NP studies do not include a distractor-repetition condition. One reason for neglecting this condition is that the two major accounts of NP until 1998 both appear to predict a distractor-repetition benefit. Inhibition theory easily explains this result because if a target is presented with a repeated distractor, the representation of which is inhibited from the preceding trial, then selection of the target should be facilitated. In terms of episodic-retrieval theory, the repetition of a distractor should cause retrieval of distractor information that is consistent with the probe task and hence probe target processing should also be facilitated. At first sight, temporal-discrimination theory appears to predict distractor-repetition costs. Note what happens in a distractor-repetition trial. In such a trial, the distractor is repeated, but the target changes *otherwise the trial would contain both distractor and target repetitions and would, thus, constitute an attended-repetition trial. As a result, a pure distractor-repetition trial contains both old information (the distractor) and new information (the target). The resulting ambiguity should delay the decision process. Hence temporal-discrimination theory appears to predict


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distractor-repetition costs, contrary to what has been observed in the past. It should be noted, however, that Milliken et al. (1998) also observed distractor-repetition benefits. In their Experiment 5, they investigated the effect of a single masked prime stimulus that sometimes reappeared as the distractor in the probe episode. As expected, reappearance of the prime as probe distractor facilitated responses to the probe target. Unfortunately, Milliken et al. offered no clear explanation for this finding. One might argue that temporal-discrimination mechanisms do not treat target stimuli and distractor stimuli alike. Rather, these mechanisms might mainly compare the target stimulus with the elements of the previous display. As a result, repetition of the target and repetition of the distractor might not produce symmetrical effects on performance. When the target repeats while the distractor changes (the usual AR condition), a match of subsequent targets might quickly produce an ‘‘old target’’ decision, even though the distractor has changed. This explains facilitation in the AR condition, despite a mismatch between prime and probe displays in that condition. When the target changes while the distractor repeats (the ‘‘pure’’ distractorrepetition condition) the mismatch of subsequent targets might (quickly) activate a ‘‘new target’’ decision, regardless of whether the distractor repeats or changes. This variant of temporal-discrimination theory would predict no effects of distractor repetition; yet it still does not predict facilitation from distractor repetition. The purpose of the present study is twofold. Firstly, we would like to stress the theoretical relevance of the distractor-repetition condition for evaluating different accounts of NP. In particular, we argue that the observation of distractor-repetition benefits is problematic for temporaldiscrimination theory. The second purpose is to further explore the empirical characteristics of distractor-repetition effects, in order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Experiment 1 is a conceptual replication of the distractor-repetition effect in the typical experimental context. Experiment 2 investigates whether distractor-repetition effects depend upon the presence of ignored-repetition trials.

EXPERIMENT 1 Experiment 1 had two aims. The first aim was to conceptually replicate the basic distractor-repetition benefit with standard stimulus material. The second aim was to see how distractor-repetition might affect performance in the usual conditions of negative-priming experiments. Therefore, the repetition or nonrepetition of the distractor was varied orthogonally to the priming manipulation. Thus, Experiment 1 is a conceptual replication of the Neumann and DeSchepper study (1991), with the exception that we use

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word stimuli as Milliken et al. (1998) did. The pure effects of distractor repetition are revealed by comparing the control conditions with distractor repetition and distractor nonrepetition, respectively.

Method Participants. Thirty students of Saarland University participated in the experiment for course credit. Participants’ median age was M/22 years (range from 18 to 29 years). All of them were native German speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Apparatus and stimuli. Stimuli were presented on a standard 17-inch VGA colour monitor. Stimulus presentation and response registration were controlled by a program created with Delphi and DirectX. Participants responded by speaking into a voice-key box that was connected to the parallel port. Stimulus words were composed of upper-case letters that subtended about 10 mm /6 mm each. Target words appeared in red; distractor words appeared in blue. The words were presented with interleaved letters at the screen centre. Half of the targets were presented slightly above the distractor; the other half slightly below. The stimulus set comprised the following eight German high frequent nouns with comparable word-frequency (CELEX, Nijmwegen, Netherlands): PALME (palm), PERLE (pearl), PULVER (powder), DOSIS (dose rate), DONNER (thunder), TELLER (plate), TENOR (tenor), TUNNEL (channel). Procedure. All participants were tested individually. Following the practice block, participants responded to 288 experimental trials. The sequence of events for one trial was as follows (cf. Figure 1): The participant started each trial by pressing the ‘‘Enter’’ key on the keyboard, which triggered the presentation of a fixation point for 307 ms at the screen centre. Next, the prime display appeared that contained the target word in red and the distractor word in blue. Participants had to name the red word as quickly and as accurately as possible. Contingent on response offset, the screen went blank for 505 ms *thus the responsestimulus interval (RSI) was 505 ms. Then the probe display appeared that also contained a red target word and a blue distractor word. Again, participants had to name the red word as quickly and as accurately as possible. Each of the six combinations of priming condition and distractor condition (repetition vs. nonrepetition) appeared 48 times, constituting a total of 288 trials. The conditions appeared in random order. Each of the eight words appeared equally often in each of the six experimental conditions. The experimenter, who sat adjacent to the participants,


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compared their responses with a list of correct responses and coded each error online. Design. The experiment rested on a 2 /3 repeated-measurements design. The first factor was priming condition (AR, IR, C). The second factor concerned the nonrepetition versus repetition of the distractor. The pure distractor-repetition effect was computed as the difference between control trials with distractor repetition and those with distractor nonrepetition.

Results Unless otherwise noted, all effects referred to as statistically significant throughout the text are associated with p -values of less than .05, two-tailed. Reaction time (RT) analyses were performed on RTs from correct trials (i.e., responses to prime and probe display were both correct) that were above 200 ms and below the Tukey-outlier value of the group mean (Tukey, 1977). Resulting from these constraints, 9.8% of the trials were excluded from RT analyses (error rate 5.5%).1 A 3 (priming condition)/2 (distractor repetition) ANOVA was performed on RTs. The corresponding means are listed in Table 1. The ANOVA yielded a significant main effect of priming condition, F (2, 58) /12.25, p B/ .001, reflecting shortest RTs for condition AR, intermediate RTs for condition IR, and longest RTs for condition C. Moreover, the main effect of distractor repetition was also significant, F (1, 29) /97.76, p B/.001, indicating shorter RTs with repeated distractors than with unrepeated distractors. It might be noted that distractor repetition produced a significant benefit for each priming condition (cf. Table 1). The two-way interaction between priming condition and distractor repetition was also significant, F (2, 58) /21.92, p B/.001. The interaction is mainly due to the fact that the effects of distractor repetition were especially large for the IR condition. When the distractor changed between prime and probe displays (i.e., as in the usual NP task), the typical negative priming effect emerged: Participants responded slower to probe targets when this target was the distractor in the preceding prime display than when it was a new target (M /7 ms, SD /18 ms), t(29) /2.07, p B/.05. Moreover, there was also a numerical benefit for 1 We used a strict criterion for distinguishing correct from incorrect vocal responses. This means that the experimenter counted every utterance that did not exactly match the correct response as an error (i.e., ‘‘ptable’’ instead of ‘‘table’’). The ‘‘true’’ error rate (i.e., participants read the distractor instead of the target) on probe displays was below 1% in all experiments.

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POWDER TENOR

505 ms

Probe display

until response

POWDER PEARL

307 ms

Prime display

+

Figure 1. The figure shows a control trial with distractor repetition in Experiments 1 or 2. Participants’ task was to read aloud the red word (shown in black) as accurately and quickly as possible, and to ignore the blue word (shown in grey).

target repetitions with distractor change, which just missed significance (M /7 ms, SD /24 ms), t(29) /1.60, p/.06, one-tailed. The pure distractor-repetition effect was computed as the difference between control trials with distractor repetition and those with distractor nonrepetition. As expected from the literature, this comparison revealed a TABLE 1 Mean reaction times and errors (in percentage) for attended repetition, control, and ignored repetition trials as a function of distractor repetition in Experiment 1 Distractor unrepeated Attended repetition Control Ignored repetition NP effectb

560 567 574 /7*

(0.8) (1.1) (0.8) (4)

Distractor repeated 539 560 537 /23**

(0.9) (1.0) (0.8) (3)

Differencea 21** (4) 7* (3) 37** (4)

a Distractor unrepeated minus distractor repeated (standard error in parenthesis). bControl minus ignored repetition (standard error in parenthesis). *p B/.05, **p B/.01.


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significant RT benefit for distractor repetitions of M /7 ms (SD /18 ms) that was significantly different from zero, t (29) /2.18, p B/ .05. A 3 (priming condition) /2 (distractor repetition) ANOVA was also performed on error rates, revealing a marginal main effect of priming condition, F (2, 58) /2.70, p/.08, indicating slightly more errors on control trials.

Discussion Experiment 1 investigated the effects of repeating the distractor between prime and probe displays on behaviour in a standard-NP task with word material. The results replicated previous findings: A significant distractorrepetition benefit of 7 ms emerged in the control condition (similar to previous findings, e.g., Milliken et al., 1998; Neumann & DeSchepper, 1991; Tipper & Cranston, 1985). As mentioned before, both inhibition theory and episodic-retrieval accounts have predicted these effects. In contrast, however, temporal-discrimination theory does not predict distractor-repetition benefits. Distractor nonrepetition in the control condition produces a complete mismatch between prime and probe displays and the probe display should be quickly categorized as ‘‘new’’. In contrast, distractor repetition in the control condition produces a partial match and the resulting ambiguity should delay the decision process. Thus, temporal-discrimination theory does not predict a distractor-repetition benefit in the control condition. Moreover, distractor repetition facilitated performance in each of the other priming conditions as well. In the IR condition, distractor repetition even turned the usually observed costs (i.e., NP) into a large benefit of 21 ms. Hence the combined positive effects of distractor repetition and target distractor congruency (e.g., Fournier & Eriksen, 1990) were able to overrule NP. In the AR condition distractor repetition also yielded significant benefits. Yet these effects are of minor importance because each of the three major accounts of NP is consistent with the observation that distractor repetition (further) facilitates performance in the AR condition.

EXPERIMENT 2 Each of the previous studies *including Experiment 1*has investigated distractor-repetition effects together with ignored-repetition effects. In other words, distractor-repetition benefits were only observed in tasks, in which the prime distractor became the probe target in a substantial number of trials. The positive correlation between prime distractors and probe targets may cause participants to pay attention to the distractor. Attention to distractors, however, may be a necessary precondition for the distractor

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being processed, and hence for distractor-repetition effects to occur. Experiment 2 investigated whether distractor-repetition benefits will still occur when the prime distractor never reappears as the probe target. Thus, there were no ignored-repetition trials in Experiment 2.

Method Participants. Thirty fresh students from Saarland University participated. They were paid t5 for participation. Their median age was 22 years (ranging from 19 to 40 years). All of them had normal or corrected-tonormal vision. Data of one participant were replaced because his/her error rate was an outlier in the sense of Tukey (1977). Design, materials, and procedure. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1 with the following exception: No IR trials were conducted; thus the number of trials was reduced to 192 trials.

Results The criteria for error detection and outlier elimination were the same as for Experiment 1. As a result, 13.4% of the trials were excluded from RT analyses (error rate 9.6%). A 2 (priming: AR versus C) /2 (distractor repetition vs. distractor nonrepetition) ANOVA with RTs as dependent variable revealed significant main effects for priming, F (1, 29) /55.18, p B/.001, and for distractor repetition, F (1, 29) /13.81, p B/.01 (see Table 2). The interaction was not significant (F B/1). For trials with distractor nonrepetition, a significant RT benefit emerged for AR trials compared to control trials (M/27 ms, SD / 21 ms), t(29) /7.26, p B/.001. A comparison of control trials with distractor repetition and those with distractor nonrepetition revealed a significant RT benefit for distractorrepetition trials (M /7 ms, SD/19 ms), t(29) /2.08, p B/.05. TABLE 2 Mean reaction times and errors (in percentage) for attended repetition and control trials as a function of distractor repetition in Experiment 2

Attended repetition Control

Distractor unrepeated

Distractor repeated

Differencea

535 (2.1) 562 (2.7)

524 (2.1) 555 (2.8)

11** (3) 7* (3)

a Distractor unrepeated minus distractor repeated (standard error in parenthesis). *p B/.05, **p B/.01.


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Analysis on error rates revealed that participants made fewer error on AR trials, F (1, 29) /8.91, p B/ .01. None of the remaining effects were significant (all F sB/1).

Discussion Experiment 2 showed that distractor-repetition benefits can be obtained even when the prime distractor never reappears as the probe target. Thus, a positive correlation between prime distractors and probe targets is not a necessary preconditions for the distractor being processed, and distractorrepetition effects to occur. Interestingly, the distractor-repetition benefits observed in the control conditions of Experiments 1 and 2 were numerically identical. This similarity suggests that processing of the distractor in the present task is independent from the relationship (i.e., correlation) between prime distractors and probe targets.

GENERAL DISCUSSION The purpose of the present study was to further investigate the effects of repeating the distractor between prime and probe displays. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that repeating the distractor from the prime to the probe display produces a reaction time benefit with word stimuli (Neumann & DeSchepper, 1991; Tipper & Cranston, 1985). Both inhibition theory and episodic-retrieval theory can explain this result. Inhibition theory predicts benefits because in the case of distractor repetition the representation of the distractor is still inhibited when the probe display appears and thus less interference from this stimulus is to be expected. The episodic-retrieval account predicts benefits because distractor repetition leads to retrieval of a memory trace for the distractor that is compatible with task demands in the probe trial. Experiment 2 further showed that distractor-repetition benefits still occur when the prime distractor never reappears as the probe target, that is, when there is no ignored-repetition condition. Thus, a positive correlation between prime distractors and probe targets, which may lead participants to attend to distractors, is not necessary for distractor-repetition effects to show up. This result is also compatible with inhibition theory and episodic-retrieval theory. Neither inhibition of the distractor nor memory encoding of the distractor should depend upon the presence of IR trials. A possible alternative explanation for the positive effects of distractor repetition on performance relates to habituation2 (e.g., Tipper et al., 1989). 2

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this alternative explanation.

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According to this account, the first appearance of a distractor in the prime display may elicit an orienting response to this stimulus, which facilitates its processing, and increases interference from the distractor. If, however, a distractor is repeated, habituation may inhibit the orienting response to the distractor, which may weaken or even eliminate distractor processing (cf. Tipper & Cranston, 1985). However, in order to explain our results, habituation must already affect the first repetition of a stimulus. This is unlikely to happen. In his review, Cowan stated that ‘‘one would not expect much perceptual habituation from a single presentation of the critical item’’ (1988, p. 179). Thus, habituation is not a good candidate for explaining distractor-repetition benefits that result from a single presentation of a stimulus. The observation of distractor-repetition benefits (without target repetition) is problematic for temporal-discrimination theory. According to this theory, the main determinant of behaviour in NP experiments is the time it takes for a decision mechanism to classify each display as ‘‘old’’ or ‘‘new’’ with regard to the preceding display. The predictions of temporal-discrimination theory with regard to distractor repetition in a control condition, in which the target changes, depend upon whether one assumes that the decision mechanism considers both the target and the distractor or one assumes that the decision mechanism considers only the target and ignores the distractor. In the first case, in which the decision mechanism considers both the target and the distractor, the nonrepetition of the target with a repetition of the distractor constitutes a partial match between the prime and the probe displays, which should delay the decision process. This situation would resemble an IR condition. This version of temporaldiscrimination theory predicts that distractor repetitions should produce costs and not *as observed*benefits. In the second case, in which the decision mechanism considers only the probe target, the repetition of the distractor should not matter, and the situation would be equivalent to the usual control condition, in which both the target and the distractor change. This version of temporal-discrimination theory predicts equivalent performance in control conditions with distractor nonrepetition, and in those with distractor repetition. Thus, the results of our study are inconsistent with different versions of temporal-discrimination theory. In fact, we are unable to see how this theory might be modified in order to explain these findings. It would certainly be premature to reject temporal-discrimination theory only because it has difficulties in explaining distractor-repetition benefits. One reason is that the theory receives support from different sets of findings. An important piece of evidence in favour of temporal-discrimination theory is the finding that a single prime stimulus can produce negative priming for a subsequent probe stimulus (e.g., Milliken et al., 1998). From this finding,


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Milliken et al. argued that NP does not arise from selecting a prime target against a prime distractor, which was taken as evidence against inhibition theory and episodic-retrieval theory. Yet alternative views on this observation are possible. For example, selection should not only occur between simultaneously presented stimuli (i.e., prime target and prime distractor), but also between consecutively presented stimuli (i.e., prime stimulus and probe target). In fact, inhibiting a single irrelevant prime stimulus, or encoding this stimulus as irrelevant, should facilitate processing of subsequent probe displays in most conditions, in which the single prime does not reappear as the probe target. In sum, distractor-repetition benefits are a robust finding that is independent from the correlation between prime distractors and probe targets. Temporal-discrimination theory seems unable to explain these effects without making further assumptions. In contrast, inhibition theory and episodic retrieval theory can explain most findings on NP and distractorrepetition benefits with the same set of assumptions and, therefore, offer more parsimonious explanations.

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Manuscript received December 2004 Manuscript accepted November 2005 First published online March 2006