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The present study examines how a person's working memory capacity (WMC) and awareness of change in context influences modulating inhibitory control. Context was manipulated by changing the predictive validity of a prime to a following target (i.e., the proportion of prime repetition) across three phases in a single-prime negative priming task. The prime was a distractor for the following target when the proportion was 25% (in the first and third phases) and a useful cue when the proportion rose to 75% (in the second phase). Participants' WMCs were measured and whether they were aware of the change of the prime-repetition proportion was determined in interviews at the end of the experiment. We found that when the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) was short (Experiment 1), participants aware of the change of prime-repetition proportion showed a null negative priming effect when the contingency increased from 25% to 75%, and then rebooted the effect when it decreased back to 25%, thus indicating an ability to modulate inhibitory control as context varied. In contrast, the unaware participants kept inhibiting primes all the time. When SOA was long (Experiment 2), participants with awareness even showed a positive priming effect when the prime-repetition proportion increased. Surprisingly, participants' WMCs did not matter except for the conscious strategy used in the long-SOA condition. This is the first study simultaneously investigating how WMC and awareness can affect people's ability to modulate inhibitory control and reveals that awareness plays a more direct role in such modulation than does WMC., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Single-prime negative priming refers to the phenomenon in which after a single prime word is briefly presented, repeating it as the probe target results in a delay in responding to the target. The present study investigated the locus of this negative priming effect. Experiment 1 showed that repeating the identity of the prime produced a negative priming effect but merely repeating the response of the prime did not. Experiment 2 showed that the negative priming effect transformed into positive priming when the probe distractor was absent. Experiments 3 and 4 further revealed that single-prime negative priming was observed when the perceptual form was repeated. Taken together, these results suggest that single-prime negative priming involves a perceptual locus., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Negative priming refers to the phenomenon of a slowed response time to a previously ignored distractor. Identity negative priming can be observed when the identity of a previous distractor is repeated as the target identity, and location negative priming can be observed when the spatial location of a previous distractor is repeated as the target location. This article reviewed and integrated previous findings and provided empirical evidence to show the dissociations between location and identity negative priming: (a) the removal of probe distractor impeded identity negative priming but not location negative priming; (b) identity negative priming was modulated by the distance between the target and distractor, while location negative priming was not; and (c) perceptual grouping of the target and distractor affected identity negative priming but not location negative priming., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)