Haley Bennett¹, Nancy Carlisle¹; ¹Lehigh University

Prior research on negative templates shows participants can use cues about upcoming distractors feature to ignore those distractors. This is demonstrated by faster reaction times when participants are provided an informative distractor cue versus an uninformative cue, leading to a negative cue benefit. However, it is unclear whether these benefits are from active top down control versus learning through experience during the task because all negative cue studies have explicitly instructed participants to ignore the negative cue. In this experiment, all participants performed the exact same task. For the Explicit Ignore group, we told them to use the negative cues to actively ignore, which should rely on top-down control. In the Memory-Focus group we told them to maintain the cue information for a working memory test, so any negative cue benefits would be driven by selection history. All participants received negative or neutral cues in two separate blocks, allowing us to compute negative cue benefits. In addition, we manipulated task difficulty by changing the similarity between targets and distractors. Prior research has shown a negative cue benefit during hard tasks, but not easy tasks. If negative template benefits depend on top-down control, we would expect to see benefits in the hard condition only for participants who were explicitly instructed to use the cue to ignore. However, if negative template benefits are based on selection history, we would expect to see benefits of the negative cue in the hard condition for both explicit instruction and memory instructions. Our results showed negative cue benefits for reaction time and accuracy in the hard condition only for participants who were explicitly instructed to use the cue to ignore. These results support the top-down control account of negative templates.