The Relationship Between Implicit and Explicit Memory in Negative and Positive Priming

Two classes of theories of priming are ones that posit that negative priming follows from Logan's (1988) instance theory of automaticity, and ones that posit ideas of inhibition (Houghton & Tipper, 1994; Neill, 1977; Tipper & Cranston, 1985). One prediction of Logan's theory is that negative priming should be positively related to recognition. The present experiments aimed to investigate the relationship between implicit and explicit memory in negative and positive priming using a hybrid methodology following from work done by Turk-Browne, Yi, and Chun (2006) and Grison, Tipper, and Hewitt (2005). Turk-Browne et al. examined positive priming and BOLD responses to images as a function of later recognition and found greater positive priming for items later classified as old than for ones classified as new. Grison et al. examined priming using a task requiring participants to classify the gender of faces and animacy of objects. Negative priming was not consistently elicited in Ignore-Attend sequences of the current studies, and as such no conclusions can be drawn regarding the explanations of negative priming