Does the Concept of Negative Priming Contribute to Our Understanding of Selective Attention?

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It is often thought that humans can receive all the information that invades their senses, however, it is fact they are not able to process all of the received information. Humans must selectively choose what information to perceive and ignore irrelevant information. Two questions are raised, therefore: what allows us to selectively attend information and what happens to unattended information, is it proceeded to any extend or not proceeded at all? Recently, the phenomenon of negative-priming started to be used to study selective attention. Negative priming is following. Two stimuli are presented to participants and they are asked to react only to one stimulus and ignore the other. The observed responses are slow if the item they have to respond to is the same as the item they have to ignore. The theory of negative priming holds that this slowdown is a result of the dual-process mechanism of selective attention where perceived information is activated and distracting information is prevented . Thus, the slowdown is the result of participant's trying to respond to an item that was prevented before the request. Many people, however, believe that the available evidence does not support the notion of an inhibitory component of the selective attention . It means that the slowdown, a characteristic of the negative priming, is observed not because of the fact that the target was previously ignored . Negative priming phenomenon reflects interaction between automatic memory processes and controlled selection processes. The presentation of the item which was a distractor before allows that item to be faster selected by the controlled selection process. Most of the work on these issues has been collaborated with Dr... ... middle of paper ... ...ailed to prove that critical items are blocked from attention and completely ignored by the participants. Negative priming is supported by the inhibitory hypothesis. It follows that the state of activation of the representation of the irrelevant information is below the primary activation level that corresponds to the neutral situation. The current evidence about the relationship between negative priming and selective attention is equivocal. Some experiments and studies seem to be consistent with the early selection view of attention, while others support the link between negative priming and selection attention theories. The issue of whether negative priming is produced by a dual process attention needs to be investigated further, but the notion that negative priming helps in understanding the process of selective attention should not be under-estimated.

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