Compare methods

	Dot-Probe Task	Sequential Priming
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1986
Originator	Colin MacLeod, Andrew Mathews & Philip Tata	Social cognition priming tradition (Fazio and colleagues)
Type	Reaction-time attentional bias paradigm	General reaction-time priming framework
Seminal source	MacLeod, C., Mathews, A., & Tata, P. (1986). Attentional bias in emotional disorders. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(1), 15-20.	Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229-238.
Aliases	Visual Probe Task, Attentional Bias Task, MacLeod Probe Task	Prime-Target Priming, Semantic-Affective Priming, Response-Window Priming
Related	3	3
Summary	The dot-probe task, introduced by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata in 1986, measures selective attention to emotional information. On each trial two stimuli -- typically one threatening and one neutral word or image -- appear simultaneously in different screen locations; they then disappear and a probe (a dot or small symbol) appears in the location previously occupied by one of them. Participants respond to the probe as fast as possible. If attention was already drawn to the threatening stimulus, probes appearing in its location are detected faster, yielding an attentional-bias score from the difference in reaction times. The task gave attentional bias an objective, behavioral operationalization and became the dominant paradigm in anxiety and emotion research, as well as a target for attention-bias-modification interventions.	Sequential priming is the general experimental framework underlying many implicit social-cognition measures: a prime is presented, followed after some interval by a target to which the participant responds, and the speed of responding reveals what the prime automatically activated. By varying the prime-target relation (semantic, affective, stereotypic, goal-related) and the stimulus onset asynchrony, researchers can map which associations are activated, how quickly, and whether the activation is automatic or strategic. Short intervals isolate automatic spreading activation that participants cannot control, while longer intervals permit controlled processes. Evaluative priming, affective priming, and stereotype priming are all special cases of this logic, making sequential priming a unifying methodological backbone for studying automatic mental processes in social psychology.