Predicting negative priming: Effects of schizotypy, cognitive failures, and anxiety

This study examined individual differences in performance during two negative priming tasks including a letter-capitalization identification task (Ferraro & Okerlund, 1996) and a Stroop task adapted in order to facilitate the negative priming effect (Dalrymple-Alford & Budayr, 1966). Tipper (1985) first identified ‘negative priming’ as the tendency for previously ignored stimuli to be processed more slowly and inaccurately during subsequent presentation. Participants in the present study included 105 college undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses. The main hypothesis tested was that the magnitude of negative priming could be affected independently by schizotypy, cognitive failures, and anxiety. Results suggest that the degrees of negative priming (DNP) on a computer task and Stroop task are not correlated. A series of discriminant analyses was performed in order to determine which factors were most predictive of overall negative priming performance. Different factors emerged for both tasks. The function predicting negative priming obtained during a computer task was able to correctly classify 66.33% of the sample. The function obtained for Stroop task performance prediction correctly classified 68.37% of the sample. Two significant functions were created in order to classify performance on both tasks simultaneously. Participants were classified with 44.33% accuracy into the resulting groups. Directions for future research are also discussed.