Negative Priming 1985 to 2015: A Measure of Inhibition, the Emergence of Alternative Accounts, and the Multiple Process Challenge

In this article, three generations of authors describe the background to the original article; the subsequent emergence of vigorous debates concerning what negative priming actually reflects, where radically different accounts based on memory retrieval were proposed; and a re-casting of the conceptual issues underlying studies of negative priming. What started as a simple observation (slowed reaction times) and mechanism (distractor inhibition) …