The effects of repeating a task-irrelevant element and inserting intervening trials between the last prime and the probe trial in a negative priming study were compared with a standard prime/probe pair. An associative model based on SAC (e.g. Reder & Schunn, 1996; Schunn, Reder, Nhouyvanisvong, Richards, & Stroffolino, 1997) was able to account for both the decrease in response times across the repeated primes and the increase in response times when the task-irrelevant element became relevant.
