Manufacture and Validation of New Negative Priming Measurement for Studying Individual Differences in Working Memory

Abstract

The Negative Priming task is widely used to investigate attention inhibition observed in some variations of a selective attention task. This study was designed to measure the reliability of a negative priming effect as a prerequisite for conducting this research. The sample included 100 university students whose ages ranged between 18 to 36 years. They completed two tasks: an identification task and a localization with episodic retrieval tasks. Subjects were asked to perform a simple mental operation on each stimulus, and to use the end product of this operation when deciding on a response.  The subjects' task was to respond YES to a fixed set of three target items (e.g., numbers 2, 5, and 7) in two interval trials. To achieve the factor structure model validity, the data method and varimax rotation was applied. Results showed high correlation between variables and also six factors as the clusters were considered: 1) Target identification accuracy; 2) Location error; 3) Two seconds right error; 4) Three seconds right error; 5) Three seconds left error and 6) Two seconds left error. The reliability of the components were acceptable.