Negative Priming Persists in the Absence of Response-Retrieval

The hypothesis that retrieval of the prime response is responsible for the negative priming (NP) effect has gained popularity in recent studies of visual identity NP. In the current study we report an experiment in which we aimed to remove the response from the prime memory trace by means of spatio-temporal separation. Compared to an identical experiment without this separation (Ihrke et al., 2011), we find that the response-retrieval-specific interaction is absent indicating that the separation was successful in preventing response-retrieval. Still, both negative and positive priming are present as main effects which show that processes other than response-retrieval can produce NP. In addition, based on recordings of the eye-movements during task processing, we localize the NP effect in a target-selection process while positive priming manifests in facilitated response-selection. Our results are in line with a multiple-route view of NP.