A neural habituation account of the negative compatibility effect.

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is the finding of slower reaction times (RTs) to report the direction of a target arrow following a subliminal prime arrow pointed in the same direction. The NCE is commonly thought to reflect automatic response inhibition, and on this assumption, it has recently been used to assess various motor disorders. Here we propose a fundamentally different account of the NCE: one that relates the NCE to a broader...