Can the location negative priming process operate in a proactive manner?

Based upon arguments put forward by Tipper et al. (2002), Tipper (2001), and Buckolz, Boulougouris, & Khan (2002, footnote 3), we believe that the inhibition-based model provides the best explanation at this time of the location variant of the negative priming (NP) effect and so have used it here exclusively to account for the NP effect.

This current experiment was re-run (n=12), this time providing participants with an additional incentive to process the cue events. Two incentive conditions were used: One, where participants simply named each cue upon its presentation (Name condition), with the second condition asking participants, in randomly selected trials, to report the cue identity after their probe response (Recall condition; 20 per trial series). Virtually no cue identification errors were made in either condition (<1%), showing that the cue items were not ignored. Nonetheless, the latency pattern remained the same as in the original experiment (see Table 3: TT4 = 438, TT5 = 411, TT6 = 414, TT8 = 425, TT10 = 440 ms). An ANOVA was calculated using within-participant mean reaction times, and with Condition (Name, Recall; between participants) and Trial Types (Table 3) serving as the main factors. Only the Trial Type factor produced a significant F-value, F(4, 40) = 4.51, p < .01, MSE = 465. The essential finding of the Newman Keuls test was that when the probe target appeared at a cued location, its latency was reliably faster (TT5 = 411, TT6 = 414 ms) than that produced when the target showed up at a location that had actually undergone prime-trial inhibition (TT10: 440 ms; i.e., had contained the prime-distractor event; an IR trial], but were statistically equivalent to that of the control condition (TT8 = 425 ms). Not only do these findings support the original data presented here pointing to a non-proactive location NP process, they show that the data pointing to this conclusion are not the result of individuals choosing to ignore the probe distractor information provided via the number cues.