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Response inhibition is a hallmark of cognitive control. An executive system inhibits responses by activating a stop goal when a stop signal is presented. The authors asked whether the stop goal could be primed by task-irrelevant information in stop-signal and go/no-go paradigms. In Experiment 1, the task-irrelevant primes GO, ###, or STOP were presented in the go stimulus. Go performance was slower for STOP than for ### or GO. This suggests that the stop goal was primed by task-irrelevant information. In Experiment 2, STOP primed the stop goal only in conditions in which the goal was relevant to the task context. In Experiment 3, GO, ###, or STOP were presented as stop signals. Stop performance was slower for GO than for ### or STOP. These findings suggest that task goals can be primed and that response inhibition and executive control can be influenced by automatic processing. Keywords: response inhibition, cognitive control, automaticity, task goals, priming

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context with its tonal center influences target chord processing. In comparison with targets following baseline contexts, which do not establish a specific tonal center, processing is facilitated for a strongly related target functioning as the tonic, but inhibited for unrelated (out-of-key) and less related (subdominant) targets. This study investigated cost and benefit patterns for the processing of the 3 most important chords of the harmonic hierarchy. Response time patterns reflected the chords' ranking: Processing was fastest for the tonic, followed by the dominant, and then the subdominant. The comparison with baseline contexts replicated the benefit of processing for tonic targets (Experiments 1 and 3) and the cost of processing for subdominant targets (Experiment 3), while dominant targets were situated at baseline level (Experiments 1 to 3). Findings indicate that listeners implicitly understand fine differences in tonal stabilities and confirm the special status of the tonic being the most expected and solely facilitated chord at the end of a tonal context. Findings are discussed with references to sensory and cognitive approaches of music perception. Keywords: musical priming, facilitation--inhibition, tonal knowledge

A novel negative priming (NP) effect is reported in which serial recall for a sequence of visually presented digits was poorer if the same sequence was presented as an irrelevant auditory sequence on the previous trial (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect was enhanced when attention was divided between the to-be-repeated auditory sequence and the concurrent to-be-remembered (TBR) sequence (Experiment 3). When the TBR sequences were also presented auditorily, NP arose only when the repeated TBR sequence was in the same voice as the previous irrelevant sequence; a voice mismatch produced positive priming (Experiment 4). The results suggest that the order of auditory events is registered preattentively and that inhibition may be applied to the acoustic transitions between irrelevant events.

The authors used a unilingual and bilingual primed lexical decision task to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored words. In the unilingual experiment, accelerated lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding target word, whereas slowed lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding ignored nontarget word. In the bilingual (English-Spanish) experiment, between-language, rather than within-language, priming manipulations were used. Although the ignored repetition negative priming effect replicated across languages, cross-language attended repetition positive priming did not. This dissociation of priming effects in the inter- versus intralanguage priming conditions contradicts episodic retrieval accounts of negative priming that deny the existence of selective inhibitory processes. On the other hand, these results support an extension of inhibition-based accounts of negative priming, because they indicate that inhibition can operate at two levels of abstraction--local word and global language--simultaneously.

This article describes how the processing of visual stimuli may be affected by the inhibition of return. Experiments involving semantic priming and flanker interference, and implications for semantics, are discussed.

Experiments have been undertaken to study whether the choice of reference frame involves the inhibition of nonselected reference frames. Findings reveal significant negative priming in both endpoints of the axis of a reference frame. This suggests that inhibition is involved in reference frame selection. Additional experiments have been been done which examined if reference-frame selection is affected when observers have to select the located object. Results also reveal negative priming on both endpoints of the axis of a reference frame.

Three experiments examined whether negative priming is a dually determined effect produced by inhibitory mechanisms and by a memorial process. Younger adults (Experiment 1) and older adults (Experiments 1-3) were tested in procedures that varied the likelihood of inducing retrieval of the prior trial. This was done by making test-trial target decoding difficult (Experiments 1 & 2) or by making prior information useful on some nonnegative priming trials (Experiment 3). Younger adults demonstrated negative priming under retrieval and nonretrieval conditions, with patterns of performance indicating different sources of negative priming effects. Older adults showed negative priming only under retrieval-inducing conditions, consistent with the view of deficient inhibitory mechanisms for older adults. The data suggest that contextual variables critically determine whether negative priming is largely due to inhibition or to episodic retrieval.

This study addresses the relationship between impulsivity and lack of inhibition. Inhibition was measured both by the interference score and by the negative priming effect in a Stroop colour-word paradigm. The negative priming effect in this paradigm is defined by slower naming of a target colour if this colour was the distractor in the immediately preceding trial. For the study, a total of 210 school children were selected. These were children rated high or low by their teachers for either social or cognitive impulsivity. A reduced negative priming effect showed up with social type but not with cognitive type impulsive children. No differences were found regarding the Stroop interference score. The divergence between negative priming and interference as a measure of inhibition was discussed. Overall, the findings corroborate the distinction between a cognitive and a social dimension of impulsivity., Impulsivity and lack of inhibition Impulsive behaviour can be characterized as sometimes excessive, action-oriented behaviour (Barratt, 1987; Barratt & Patton, 1983). This tendency to action is often attributed to deficient [...]

Two experiments assess adult age differences in the extent of inhibition or negative priming generated in a selective-attention task. Younger adults consistently demonstrated negative priming effects; they were slower to name a letter on a current trial that had served as a distractor on the previous trial relative to one that had not occurred on the previous trial. Whether or not inhibition dissipated whn the response to stimulus interval was lengthened from 500 ms in Experiment 1 to 1,200 ms in Experiment 2 depended upon whether young subjects were aware of the patterns across trial types. Older adults did not show inhibition at either interval. The age effects are interpreted within the Hasher-Zacks (1988) framework, which proposes inhibition as a central mechanism determining the contents of working memory and consequently influencing a wide array of cognitive functions.

Campbell and Clark (1989) presented evidence that answers to simple multiplication problems are temporarily inhibited after they have been retrieved. According to the network-interference model, inhibition of incorrect, associatively related responses should facilitate retrieval. This prediction was confirmed by new analyses of the Campbell and Clark data: When successive multiplication problems were related (i.e., 'neighbours' in the same time-tables), second-problem response times were faster and accuracy was higher than when successive problems were. unrelated. In another expeirment, subjects received pairs of multiplication problems in which the second problem was presented 500 ms after the response to the first. Control trials involved a subtraction probe followed by a multiplication target. Experimental trials confirmed the predicted benefits of inhibition of related answers, and controls showed that experimental effects were not due to a simple effect of operand repetition. Campbell et Clark (1989) ont presente des evidences qui expliquent comment des problemes de multiplication simple sont temporairement inhibes apres avoir ete recouvres. Selon le modele d'interference de reseaux, l'inhibition de reponses incorrectes associatvement reliees devrait faciliter le recouvrement. Cette prediction a ete confirmee par de nouvelles analyses des donnees de Campbell et Clark: lorsque des problemes de multiplication successifs etaient relies ('voisins' dans la meme table de multiplication), les temps de reponses du deuxieme probleme etaient plus rapides et la precision plus grande que dans les cas ou les problemes successifs n'etaient pas relies. Dans une autre experience, les sujets recevaient des paires de problemes de multiplication dans lesquels le deuxieme probleme etait presente 500 ms apres la reponse au premier. Les essais de controle impliquait une sonde de soustraction suivi d'une cible de multiplication. Les essais experimentaux ont confirme les effets benefiques predits de l'inhibition des reponses reliees et les controles ont montre que les effets experimentaux n'etaient pas dus a un simple effet de repetition operante.

Semantic priming effects from newly learned vocabulary words are examined in a lexical decision task. At low levels of learning, those primes whose meanings are recognizable but not recallable can inhibit responses to well-known, semantically related target words, whereas those whose meaning are recallable produce either no effect or facilitation, depending on instructions concerning how to use the prime information. These results are consistent with the notion that semantic priming effects are determined at least in part by the nature of the retrieval operations performed on the prime and target, over and above influences due to spreading activation and confirmed or violated expectations. Specifically, they indicate a need to include mechanisms other than violated expectations that can produce inhibition of retrieval. Candidate mechanisms are discussed.

ABSTRACT. In 2 experiments (N = 10, Experiment 1; N = 16, Experiment 2), the authors investigated whether evidence for response facilitation and subsequent inhibition elicited by masked prime stimuli [...]

Abstract * Detection reaction time (RT) at an extrafoveal location can be increased by noninformative precues presented at that location or ipsilaterally to it. This cue-induced inhibition is called inhibition [...]

Inhibitory models of working memory efficiency (Engle, 1996; Zacks & Hasher, 1994) assert that individual differences in working memory reflect the efficiency of inhibitory processes that exclude irrelevant information and suppress no-longer-relevant information. The present study examined the implication that these two inhibitory processes operate at consistent levels of efficiency within individuals by examining the correlation between two cognitive inhibition effects, negative priming and negative error priming. Negative priming involves slower response to a probe-trial target that was used as a to-be-ignored distractor on the immediately preceding prime trial. Negative error priming is the phenomenon that errors in a sequence of simple arithmetic trials are unlikely to involve the correct answer to the preceding problem. Participants received distractor--target pairs of simple addition problems and were required to produce the target problem sum. Negative priming was observed for prime distractors, whereas negative error priming was observed in connection with previous targets but not distractors. Consistent with the assumptions of these working memory models, the magnitudes of the two effects were significantly correlated.