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Negative priming refers to the delayed response to a probe target that was previously a prime distractor. Memory retrieval has been proposed as one critical mechanism for the manifestation of negative priming. This perspective perpetuates that the contextual similarity between prime and probe trials should modulate memory retrieval, and therefore, affect negative priming. However, evidence for the contextual similarity effect in negative priming is mixed. The present study tested the hypothesis that attended contextual cues are more likely to be encoded into a distractor representation, and thus, are more likely to modulate the negative priming effect. By manipulating whether the contextual cues were relevant to the task demand in Section 1, and by manipulating whether cues had an abrupt or simultaneous onset, and by analysing reaction time (RT) distributions of the data in Section 2, our results demonstrated that attended cues produced the contextual similarity effect in negative priming, especially when RTs were long.

The current study used a naming task to investigate whether strategic control could modulate the process of attentional capture that is driven by working memory. The use of a naming task to engage working memory eliminates potential strategic perceptual resampling, which may have played a role in several previous studies. After naming a prime, participants performed a selection task in which they judged the direction of a moving target in each trial. Prime validity, which is the probability that the primes are identical to the selection targets, was manipulated across four experiments. The results showed that reaction times to the motion judgment were faster in the valid condition than in the invalid condition when the prime validity was 50% (Experiment 1A). These results occurred even in the presence of a highly informative spatial cue that predicted the target's location (Experiment 4). A larger capturing effect was observed when the validity was 70% (Experiments 2 and 3). When the prime validity was lower than the chance level (0% in Experiment 1B; 15% in Experiments 2 and 3), a validity effect was not observed. Thus, the results suggest that there is a strong tendency for working memory to capture attention by default when there is no reason to avoid the influence of primes. When there is a reason to avoid the influence, strategic control modulates the attentional capture that is driven by working memory.

Negative priming (NP) refers to the delayed response to a probe target that was previously a prime distractor. One peculiar problem in NP literature is the observation that the manifestation of identity NP is contingent on the presence and type of probe distractors. When the probe distractors were completely removed, positive priming, rather than NP, was usually observed. This study investigated whether location NP was affected by the same manipulations. The proportion of ignored repetition trials, attended repetition trials, and control trials was manipulated across Experiments 1-3. These three experiments showed reliable location NP effect when the probe distractor was consistently absent. Experiment 4 showed that the presence of probe distractors did not increase the magnitude of the location NP effect. Experiment 5 showed that the location NP effect observed was not contingent on perceptual mismatching. These findings suggest that the presence of probe distractors is not a necessary component for the manifestation of location NP. Theoretical implications were discussed.

Attention capture by an exogenous cue can result in slowed responses to a target, which appeared at that cued location later. This is the phenomenon of inhibition of return (IOR). In the current study, the effect of IOR on performance in a location selection task was studied. A target and a distractor were presented at the same time, and the participants were instructed to indicate the location of the target by manual response. The results showed that it took longer to respond to the target at the cued location. More importantly, it took a shorter time to respond to the target when the distractor was presented at the cued location. These findings support the idea that IOR can facilitate performance in a target selection task if the distractor location is cued.