The Role Of Initiation Stimulus And Masking Stimulation In The Negative Compatibility Effect

In masked priming paradigm, participants make a speeded two-alternative choice response to a clearly visible "target" stimulus (e.g., a left-or right-hand key press to an arrow pointing to the left or right).When the SOA between the mask and target is confined to range100ms and300ms,the response to the target which is same direction as the prime is slower than the different target. The researchers name this counterintuitive psychological phenomenon as Negative Compatibility Effect. This phenomenon is considered to represent an inhibition to the subliminal prime in the motor system. However, numerous studies have proved negative compatibility effect still occurs under conditions of high prime visibility, and other studies have found that the negative compatibility occurs when the prime is high visibility and no masks emerges between the prime and the target. There is some similarity between the masked priming paradigm and the objection priming paradigm:first, the prime can automatically trigger the response action before the prime is recognized; second, the negative compatibility can occurs under the conditions that the SOA between target and the preceding stimulus is about100ms, third, some researcher regard the prime and mask can integrate into a dramatically changing objection. So we hypothesis that the activation that the prime induced integrated into the mask is the reason that make occurrence of the inhibition in the negative compatibility.The study of this paper employs the paradigm proposed by Jaskowski. The paper have three different experiments to confirm the hypothesis:in experiment1, we contrast the compatibility effect between condition of the relevant mask and irrelevant mask. The result shows that the difference of compatibility between relevant mask and irrelevant mask is vanished when we make the integration of the prime and mask by building an rectangle; in the experiment2, we found that the negative compatibility effect disappears when the prime and mask are in two different objections, nevertheless when the prime and mask are appeared in the same objection, the negative compatibility emerges; the result of experiment3shows that the result of the experiment2is not due to the different process of the mask when the prime is in the different objection or the same objection.In sum, we can make following conclusions:the inhibition negative compatibility effect in involves the process integration between the activation the prime incurred and the mask; the role of prime visibility in the negative compatibility may influence the integrative process between the mask and prime; mask plays an important role in the occurrence of negative compatibility effect in virtue of providing an objection that the motor activation of prime can integrate.