"Aging, optimal testing times, and negative priming": Correction.

Reports 2 errors in the article "Aging, Optimal Testing Times, and Negative Priming' by M. J. Intons-Peterson, Paola Rocchi, Tara West, Kimberly McLellan, and Amy Hackney (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1998, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 362–376; see record 1998-00017-007). On page 370, the sentence beginning on line 6 of the Method section should have read as follows: "the younger adults were fulfilling a partial requirement of their introductory psychology courses, and the older group was drawn randomly from participants who served in the normative study and from more recently tested older individuals.' The final phrase of the sentence has been added to more accurately reflect the number of participants in the older group. The second error is on page 368. The entries in the left column of Table 3 were incorrect. The corrected table is presented. A portion of the original abstract follows: The effects of time-of-day preferences on selective attention were tested in 2 experiments after normative work with 975 younger adults and 143 older adults verified C. P. May, L. Hasher, and E. R. Stoltzfus's (1993) finding that most older adults prefer the morning, whereas younger adults prefer activities later in the day. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the negative priming effect: A meta-analysis.

This article reports results from a meta-analysis on adult age differences in the negative priming effect (21 studies on identity negative priming and 8 on location negative priming). Both younger and older adults were found to be susceptible to the negative priming effect in identity and location tasks. Effect sizes were homogeneous for both tasks, indicating that the data are adequately described without reference to moderator variables. State trace analysis on identity tasks, in which mean latencies in negative priming conditions were regressed onto mean latencies in baseline conditions, showed (a) that in both age groups the negative priming effect is proportional rather than additive and (b) that the negative priming effect is smaller in older adults as compared with younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic retrieval in negative priming and repetition priming.

Subjects identified target letters flanked by incompatible distractor letters (e.g., ABA). Distractor onset was randomly simultaneous with target onset or was delayed by 400 ms. In Experiment 1, one third of probe-trial targets were identical to the preceding prime-trial distractor. Responses were slower to repeated letters than to unrepeated letters (negative priming) only when prime and probe trials shared the same distractor-onset conditions. In Experiment 2, one third of probe-trial targets were identical to the preceding prime-trial target. Significant facilitation (repetition priming) occurred for repeated targets in all conditions but was again greater when prime and probe trials shared the same distractor-onset conditions. The results strongly support episodic retrieval theories of both negative priming and repetition priming and suggest that a common mechanism underlies both phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Target selection difficulty, negative priming, and aging.

It has been recently suggested that the presence of identity negative priming effects in old adults could occur when there is substantial processing of the distracting information in a selective attention task (J. M. Kieley & A. A. Hartley, 1997). In three experiments, using a letter identification task, it was found that making target selection more difficult increased the magnitude of the negative priming effect to a similar extent in both young and old adults. Moreover, the size of the negative priming effect did not differ between young and elderly participants. These results are discussed with respect to the issue of age-related deficits in the mechanisms underlying negative priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of negative priming.

The negative priming task is widely used to investigate attentional inhibition. A critical review of the negative priming literature considers various parameters of the task (e.g., time course, relation to interference, level of occurrence, and susceptibility to changes in task context). It also takes into account life span data and the performance of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. On these bases, the review suggests that negative priming can be produced by 2 mechanisms: memorial and inhibitory. With respect to inhibition, the review suggests that (a) there are 2 systems, one responsible for identity and the other for location information; and (b) inhibition is a flexible, postselection process operating to prevent recently rejected information from quickly regaining access to effectors, thus helping to establish coherence among selected thought and action streams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dual mechanisms of negative priming.

Three experiments examined whether negative priming is a dually determined effect produced by inhibitory mechanisms and by a memorial process. Younger adults (Experiment 1) and older adults (Experiments 1–3) were tested in procedures that varied the likelihood of inducing retrieval of the prior trial. This was done by making test-trial target decoding difficult (Experiments 1 & 2) or by making prior information useful on some nonnegative priming trials (Experiment 3). Younger adults demonstrated negative priming under retrieval and nonretrieval conditions, with patterns of performance indicating different sources of negative priming effects. Older adults showed negative priming only under retrieval-inducing conditions, consistent with the view of deficient inhibitory mechanisms for older adults. The data suggest that contextual variables critically determine whether negative priming is largely due to inhibition or to episodic retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and negative priming in a location suppression task: The long and the short of it.

The role of temporal parameters in aging and inhibitory function was examined using negative priming (NP) and repetition priming (RP) in a task involving a series of visually presented prime-probe sets; responses were made on the basis of the location of a target stimulus. Preparatory intervals (PI) preceding prime-probe sets were 3,000 ms or 1,500 ms. The longer PI resulted in less NP in older adults than did the shorter PI. Further analyses suggest that older adults may be less prepared to inhibit the distractor following the longer PI. The longer PI also produced more RP than did the shorter PI for both age groups, indicating a greater emphasis on facilitatory processes in this condition. In addition, evidence was obtained to suggest that an inverse relationship between NP and RP exists for both young and old adults. These data suggest that individuals or task conditions may emphasize either facilitation or inhibition in selection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the priming of newly learned associations.

In each of 2 experiments, 32 young (aged 18–25 yrs) and 32 elderly (aged 63–79 yrs) adults studied 36 sentences of the form NOUN1-VERB-NOUN2. They then made item-recognition judgments regarding whether single nouns had occurred in the sentences. After 2 or more presentations of each sentence, both young and elderly Ss showed equivalent priming between the nouns within the sentences; a noun was recognized faster when it was tested immediately after the other noun from the same sentence than when it was tested following a noun from a different sentence. After only 1 presentation of each sentence, young Ss showed priming but elderly Ss did not. Under all study conditions, young Ss were superior to the elderly in cued recall of the same sentences. It is argued that priming provides a sensitive measure of what is stored in memory and so will be useful for studies of aging. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhanced negative priming in Parkinson's disease.

In the ignored repetition paradigm, negative priming (NP) is defined as the increase in response time that occurs when the current target stimulus served as a distractor stimulus in the previous trial. In this study, 25 Parkinson's disease (PD) participants and 17 age-matched healthy controls (HCs) were tested using a touchscreen version of the ignored repetition task that allowed response time to be partitioned into response initiation and response execution segments. In both groups, NP effects were stronger in the response execution than in the response initiation segments. The most striking result was that the PD group showed larger NP effects overall than the HC group. In PD, clinical ratings of bradykinesia, but not tremor, were related to larger NP effects. Results indicate that in PD, disruption of dopamine neuromodulation diminishes response efficiency when action must be directed toward previously ignored information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No negative priming without cognitive control.

There is evidence that the efficiency of selective attention depends on the availability of cognitive control mechanisms as distractor processing has been found to increase with high load on working memory or dual task coordination (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). We tested the prediction that cognitive control load would also affect the negative priming effect produced when a distractor from 1 trial appears as a target on the next trial. We measured priming on trials that involved either high or low cognitive control load, and found that under high control load, negative priming was eliminated, and could even be reversed to positive priming, suggesting that the negative priming effect depends on the availability of cognitive control resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Object-based perceptual grouping affects negative priming.

In 5 experiments the authors examine the role of object-based grouping on negative priming. The experiments used a letter-matching task with multiple letters presented in temporally separated prime and probe displays. On mismatch trials, distractor letters in primes were repeated as targets in probes, or distractor and target letters were completely different. Negative priming was shown by slowed responses when distractors were repeated as targets relative to when the stimuli differed. This occurred both when only letters were presented (Experiments 1 and 4) and when letters were surrounded by boxes (Experiment 5). Experiments 2, 3, and 4 showed that negative priming was affected by the grouping of target and distractor letters in prime displays. Negative priming was reduced when 1 of the distractor letters was placed in the target box and 1 was left outside the box; facilitatory priming was observed when both distractor letters appeared in the target box. The data were accounted for in terms of there being (a) object-based competition for visual selection, (b) inhibition of distractor objects that compete for selection with target objects, and (c) activation or inhibition of the identities of all component elements within target or distractor objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and feature-specific priming of familiar and novel stimuli.

English and Turkish words in 2 fonts were presented to young and elderly Ss, and memory was assessed directly with recognition tests and indirectly with reading time. Young and elderly Ss showed repetition priming on English words and showed larger priming effects when the study and test fonts were the same rather than different. Elderly Ss were impaired, however, on recognition of feature-specific information in comparison with young Ss. When Turkish words were shown, only young Ss evidenced priming, despite recognition performance above chance for both young and elderly Ss. A 2nd experiment replicated these findings with different materials. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of stimulus repetition on negative priming.

Potential age-related differences in the influence of stimulus repetition on negative and positive priming were investigated in a same-different picture comparison task. Forty-eight young adults and 48 old adults compared a target picture of a familiar object with a standard picture of a familiar object to determine if they were the same or different, while ignoring an overlapping distractor picture presented in a different color. Negative priming effects increased in magnitude with the repetition of the experimental stimuli in a similar fashion for both young and old adults. Conversely, positive priming effects decreased in magnitude with increases in stimulus repetition for both young and old adults. These data suggest that identity-based inhibition develops in a similar fashion from young adulthood to old age. Furthermore, these data add to the growing body of studies that suggest age invariance in the ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information on the basis of stimulus identity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hope, pride, and processing during optimal and nonoptimal times of day.

We examine the conditions under which the distinct positive emotions of hope versus pride facilitate more or less fluid cognitive processing. Using individuals' naturally occurring time of day preferences (i.e., morning vs. evening hours), we show that specific positive emotions can differentially influence processing resources. We argue that specific positive emotions are more likely to influence processing and behavior during nonoptimal times of day, when association-based processing is more likely. We show in three experiments that hope, pride, and a neutral state differentially influence fluid processing on cognitive tasks. Incidental hope facilitates fluid processing during nonoptimal times of day (compared with pride and neutral), improving performance on tasks requiring fluid intelligence (Experiment 1) and increasing valuation estimates on tasks requiring that preferences be constructed on the spot (Experiments 2 and 3). We also provide evidence that these differences in preference and valuation occur through a process of increased imagination (Experiment 3). We contribute to emotion theory by showing that different positive emotions have different implications for processing during nonoptimal times of day. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.

The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only affective primes produced significant shifts in Ss' judgments of novel stimuli. Results suggest that when affect is elicited outside of conscious awareness, it is diffuse and nonspecific, and its origin and address are not accessible. Having minimal cognitive participation, such gross and nonspecific affective reactions can therefore be diffused or displaced onto unrelated stimuli. At optimal exposures this pattern of results was reversed such that only cognitive primes produced significant shifts in judgments. Together, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of cigarette smoking on negative priming.

Nicotine administration has been found to enhance performance on tasks of selective attention. It has been proposed that efficient attentional filtering depends on the successful inhibition of distracting information. In the work reported here, a negative priming paradigm was adopted to test whether smoking enhanced the inhibition of irrelevant information. Thirty-six minimally deprived smokers, half of whom smoked and half of whom sham smoked, completed the negative priming task. A significantly larger negative priming effect was found in participants who had smoked in comparison with those who sham smoked. These results support the hypothesis that nicotine enhances the inhibition of distracting information and thus suggest a possible mechanism by which smoking may enhance selective attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of perceptual load in negative priming.

Negative priming (NP) effects from irrelevant distractors were assessed as a function of perceptual load in the processing of prime targets. Participants searched for a target letter among a varying number of nontarget letters in the center of the display and ignored an irrelevant peripheral distractor. NP from this distractor was found to depend on the relevant search set size, decreasing as this set size was increased. The authors conclude that exhausting attention in relevant processing reduces irrelevant processing (e.g., N. Lavie, 1995), leaving less distractor processing to produce NP. This conclusion is consistent with recent reactive inhibition views for NP (e.g., G. Houghton, S. P. Tipper, B. Weaver, & D. I. Shore, 1996). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age, testing at preferred or nonpreferred times (testing optimality), and false memory.

Two experiments investigated whether age and testing at preferred (optimal) times of day or nonpreferred (nonoptimal) times affected the ability to select relevant from irrelevant but thematically related alternatives in a verbal false memory paradigm. A 3rd experiment pursued the same issues with a visual false memory paradigm. In all 3 experiments, younger adults (n?=?195) correctly recalled studied items more often than older adults (n?=?121), whereas the 2 age groups correctly recognized about the same numbers of previously studied items. In all 3 experiments, nonoptimally tested older adults had mom difficulty excluding nonstudied but thematically related items than the other groups; thus, they showed the greatest evidence of false memory, although all groups did so to a significant extent The results suggest that optimality and its circadian determinants need to be considered with some tasks for the elderly. Various models and mechanisms are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of priming positive and negative outcomes on drinking responses.

Studied the effects of priming positive and negative expectancy outcomes on the drinking responses of college students. Men and women (N?=?64; mean age 19.5 yrs) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 priming conditions: a positive expectancy outcome condition, a negative expectancy outcome condition, and a neutral (control) condition. Participants were exposed to a series of semantic primes corresponding to their condition and then asked to complete a beer taste-rating task. Planned comparisons revealed that the average ratio of beer consumed to body weight in the positive condition was significantly greater than the average ratio in the neutral condition, and the average ratio of beer consumed to body weight was significantly less in the negative condition than the average ratio in the neutral condition. These findings are discussed as they relate to cognitive models of alcohol use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)