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Mask‐ and distractor‐triggered inhibitory processes in the priming of motor responses: An EEG study
Author(s) -
Jaśkowski Piotr,
Białuńska Anita,
Tomanek Monika,
Verleger Rolf
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00595.x
Subject(s) - psychology , priming (agriculture) , prime (order theory) , electroencephalography , negativity effect , inhibitory postsynaptic potential , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , negative priming , consciousness , response priming , subliminal stimuli , audiology , communication , selective attention , cognition , lexical decision task , botany , germination , mathematics , combinatorics , biology , medicine
Masked stimuli presented near the threshold of conscious awareness may act as primes, affecting responses to subsequent targets. With arrows as primes and targets, the prime–mask–target sequence has been shown to evoke triphasic lateralized readiness potentials (LRP) with two phases of imbalance between hemispheres preceding the target‐related contralateral preponderance of negativity: first a negative, then a positive preponderance contralateral to prime direction. The present article provides evidence that the second wave is related to mask presentation and reflects inhibitory processing independent of reductions in prime visibility, even being evoked by nonmasking distractors that leave the prime fully accessible for consciousness. Of all hypotheses put forward to account for inverse effects in masked priming, this finding is most compatible with the mask‐triggered inhibition hypothesis suggested by P. Jaśkowski (2007).