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MENTAL MODEL · M5368

Negative Priming

Negative Priming
Learn & MetacognitionHigh supportCognitive Psychology
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Updated 2026-08-04

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

A finding from selective attention research: when a distractor is actively suppressed in one task and then appears as the target in the next, responses to it are slower than to an equivalent stimulus that was not previously ignored. The suppression appears to leave a residue that must be lifted before the item can be processed, which shows that ignoring is not free and leaves a trace. The same inertia operates socially, where someone long treated as background is harder to notice even after they begin to matter. Qualification: the effect is measured in tightly controlled laboratory tasks, and the social reading is an analogy rather than a demonstrated mechanism.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Inertia of ignoring: recognize that a suppressed item carries a penalty when it later becomes relevant. - Tag reset: periodically revisit the people and options you have filed as background and lift the old suppression. - Black-horse watch: give long-ignored colleagues a real chance to show what they can do.

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Anchor fast decisions

Selective attention suppresses distractors by tagging them, which is efficient while the task lasts. The tag persists after the task ends, so when the same item becomes the target, processing must first undo the inhibition before the normal analysis can proceed. The delay is the visible cost of the earlier filtering, which is why long-standing habits of ignoring something make it disproportionately hard to respond to later.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_primingZH · Explicit
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