Concurrent right–left and amplitude spatial congruency effects in a visual discrimination task

Stimulus-Response Compatibility Effect in the Near-Far Dimension: A Developmental Study

“…Surprisingly, no SRC effect was found on MT (mu parameter of the ex-Gaussian function for MT) at all the ages tested in the present experiment. It was indeed reported in previous studies that SRC effect affects both RT and MT ( Buetti and Kerzel, 2009 ; Coutte et al, 2015 ). According to Buetti and Kerzel (2009) , SRC tasks affect the selection of manual responses during both motor preparation and execution stages, such that SRC effect is observed on RT (latency of response initiation), MT (duration of response execution) and movement kinematic parameters (initial direction of the response for instance).…”

“…Accordingly, SRC effect does not depend of the relevant or irrelevant nature of the stimulus-response features in relation to the task, but simply the presence of an overlap between perceptual and motor dimensions ( Kornblum, 1994 ; Hommel, 1997 ). In agreement with this, SRC effect is not restricted to the right-left dichotomy and several studies have shown that the effect can be extended to the near-far (e.g., Olivier, 2006 ; Coutte et al, 2015 ) as well as the up-down (e.g., Cho and Proctor, 2002 ; Meiran, 2005 ) spatial dimensions. Furthermore, SRC effect is thought to affect response selection as well as the subsequent programming and execution stages of motor responses ( Buetti and Kerzel, 2008 , 2009 ; Coutte et al, 2015 ).…”

“…This effect corresponds to the classical SRC effect and was observed for the μ parameter (mean performance) but not for the σ (performance variability) and τ (asymmetry in the distribution) parameters of the ex-Gaussian distribution of RT distribution. However, the group analysis revealed that this pattern of results was affected by children age as only the 11-years children showed the typical pattern of SRC effect usually observed in adults ( Tucker and Ellis, 2001 ; Olivier, 2006 ; Buetti and Kerzel, 2008 ; Coutte et al, 2015 ). SRC effect seems thus to appear at a specific period of children development, with a shift in the performance occurring between 8 and 11 years, as suggested by the data on RT (we indeed observed a trend toward significant effect for 10-years-old children).…”

“…As a whole, the present findings are thus compatible with the idea of a critical period of qualitative change between the age of 8–10 years, in particular in the way visual information is processed in relation to other sensory systems ( Gori et al, 2008 ) and the motor system ( Adalbjornsson et al, 2008 ; Thibaut and Toussaint, 2010 ; Ego et al, 2016 ). The presence of the SRC effect may indeed be interpreted as the effect of predictive mechanisms associated with the perceptual-motor coupling linked to the processing of the visual stimulus ( Hommel, 2011 ; Coutte et al, 2015 ). According to SRC effect, in the presence of a visual stimulus intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of that stimulus are automatically processed, as well as the motor response aligned with the distance of the stimulus.…”

“…In line with Buetti and Kerzel (2008) , we expected also an improvement of children performances in terms of lower reaction time (RT) and movement time (MT) in the congruent condition. In our implementation of the SRC paradigm, children were exposed to a chessboard with one black or white pawn presented either at a proximal or distal location, as previously used by Coutte et al (2015) to evaluate the SRC effect in the near-far dimension. The task was to respond to the color of a chess pawn by responding with the right hand toward either a proximal or distal location, regardless of the proximal-distal position of the pawn.…”