Endogenous and exogenous control of attention in dichotic listening.

Dichotic listening to verbal stimuli results in a right ear advantage (REA), indicating a left hemisphere processing superiority. The magnitude of the REA can be modulated by instructions to direct attention to the left or right ear stimulus. A previous study from our laboratory showed that presenting a prime syllable before the presentation of the dichotic syllables increases reports of the nonprimed syllable, apparently a negative priming effect that inhibits attention to the distracting prime representation. The present study combined attention instruction and priming, making up a 3 × 3 factorial design. The prime stimulus was a single consonant-vowel syllable presented binaurally just before onset of the dichotic consonant-vowel syllables. Results showed that both instructions and priming manipulations had an effect on which dichotic stimulus was selected. There was also a significant interaction between attention instruction and priming manipulation, indicating that the mechanism for instructed attention and the mechanism for negative priming work on the same level of processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)