Spatial Negative Priming Without Mismatching: Comment on Park and Kanwisher (1994)

In spatial selective attention tasks, response time to locate a target is often longer when the target appears in a location that was recently occupied by an ignored distractor. It has been assumed that this “negative priming” effect occurs because internal representations associated with the distractor are inhibited during selection of the prime display target. In contrast, J. Park and N. Kanwisher (1994) have argued recently that spatial negative priming arises from mismatches between properties of the ignored distractor and subsequent probe target. In this article, 3 separate experiments demonstrate that negative priming can occur when the prime distractor and probe target are identical. Such effects are contrary to Park and Kanwisher's (1994) mismatching account of negative priming but congenial with an object-based inhibition mechanism of selection.