The effect of asymmetrical association on positive and negative semantic priming

One's actively ignoring a stimulus can impair subsequent responding to that stimulus. This negative priming effect has been argued to generalize to semantically related items as well, but the evidence for this is still somewhat weak. This article presents a new experiment in which participants made lexical decisions toasymmetrically associated prime-target pairs presented in either the forward (e.g.,stork-baby) or backward (e.g.,baby-stork) direction. The critical new finding was that bothattended positive andignored negative semantic priming occurred only for prime-target pairs presented in the forward direction. The results support either (1) aspreading inhibition model in which items associated with an ignored distractor are inhibited during prime selection or (2) a version of episodic retrieval theory in which the prime distractor and items associated with it are tagged as “to-be-ignored” during prime selection.