You Better Stop! Binding “Stop” Tags to Irrelevant Stimulus Features

Abstract

We investigated whether the basic process of integrating stimuli (and their features) with simultaneously executed responses transfers to situations in which one does not respond to a stimulus. In three experiments, a stop-signal task was combined with a sequential priming paradigm to test whether irrelevant stimulus features become associated with a “stop” tag. Stopping a simple response during the prime trial delayed responding and facilitated stopping in the probe if the same irrelevant stimulus feature was repeated in the probe. These repetition priming effects were independent of the relation between the to-be-executed (or to-be-stopped) responses in the prime and probe, indicating that “stop” tags are global (“stop all responses!”) rather than being response-related (e.g., “stop left response!”).