Inhibition of masked primes as revealed by saccade curvature

Abstract

In masked priming, responses are often speeded when primes are similar to targets (‘positive compatibil- ity effect’). However, sometimes similarity of prime and target impairs responses (‘negative compatibility effect’). A similar distinction has been found for the curvature of saccade trajectories. Here, we test whether the same inhibition processes are involved in the two phenomena, by directly comparing response times and saccade curvature within the same masked priming paradigm. Interestingly, we found a dissociation between the directions of masked priming and saccade curvature, which could indi- cate that multiple types of inhibition are involved in the suppression of unwanted responses.