User:Poornima Venkataraman/sandbox
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Negative Priming is the implicit memory effect in which prior exposure to a stimulus unfavorably influences the response to the same stimulus. It falls under the category of priming, which is a memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus without any conscious awareness. Negative priming is the effect where a reaction to a stimulus that is previously ignored is slow and error-prone.[1] For example, when you are trying to pick out the red pen from the pen holder, the red pen is the target of your attention and the remaining pens are blocked as distractors. If you want to switch to the blue pen next, there is a momentary delay in this action. This slow reaction is caused by the negative priming effect as the blue pen was once a distractor.
Negative priming is believed to play a crucial role in selective attention and memory retrieval processes. Both attention and memory are similar in that many internal representation are activated simultaneously and only certain of them are selected to be filed in the short term memory. Negative priming is assumed to reflect both the excitation and inhibition associated with the competing distractors during the selection process.
Negative priming is also known as the mechanism using which we apply inhibitory control over cognition. This refers only to the inhibition stimuli that can interfere with the current short term goal of creating a response.[2] The effectiveness of inhibiting the interferences depends on the cognitive control mechanism as a higher number of distracters yields higher load on working memory. Increased load on working memory can in turn result in slower perceptual processing leading to delayed reaction. Therefore, negative priming effect depends on the amount of distractors, effectiveness of the cognitive control mechanism and the availability of the cognitive control resources.[3]