In the Eriksen flanker paradigm, peripheral flankers help or harm performance depending on their congruency with a central target. It has been observed that immediate preview of the flankers reduces the classic flanker effect. In light of priming experiments that reveal perceptual discounting, we investigated the contribution of target priming to the observed flanker preview effect. Three experiments manipulated the presence/absence of flankers in the response display as well as the duration, location, identity, and response characteristics of prime displays that appeared immediately prior to the response display. Participants made consonant-vowel judgments to target letters, allowing separate measurement of identity and response priming. In every experiment, there was remarkable similarity between presence/absence of flankers, which suggests that the flanker preview effect is largely due to priming of the target letter. Using a dynamic neural network model with transient habituation we accounted for both identity and response effects at the different prime durations. |