Repeated-stimulus superiority and inferiority effects in the identification of letters and digits

Abstract

When a target stimulus in a predesignated location is identified by a keypress response, responses are slightly faster if noise stimuli in adjacent locations are identical to the target than if they are a different stimulus assigned to the same response (a repeated-stimulus superiority effect). An exception to this result has been found in experiments that used randomly intermixed letter and digit stimuli. These experiments showed slower responding for identical noise than for nonidentical, response-compatible noise (a repeated-stimulus inferiority effect). The present study investigated these phenomena in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that both the superiority and inferiority effects can be obtained in the same experiment. They also provided evidence that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect is a function of the intermixing of letters and digits and not of the larger target-set size that has been used for mixed lists. Experiment 3 demonstrated that, with unmixed presentation, the repeated-stimulus superiority effect is enhanced by an increase in the number of stimuli assigned to each response. The experiments are consistent with accounts that attribute the repeated-stimulus superiority effect to competition that occurs when different internal recognition responses are activated. Moreover, the experiments suggest that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect has its basis in processes that occur subsequent to feature extraction.

Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search.

“…Thus, the distraction from the irrelevant display items was not due entirely to the priming of incompatible responses but also involved a more general form of distraction. Related findings in nonsearch tasks have been attributed to competition among internal recognition responses (C. W. Eriksen & Schultz, 1979;Grice & Gwynne, 1985;Proctor & Fober, 1985). In the present search task, it is likely that this competition arises from the fact that the location of the target is not predictable.…”

“…The effects of response-compatible flankers are less consistent and may lead to response facilitation when the flankers are presented before the target (Flowers, 1990;Taylor, 1977). But when response-compatible flankers occur simultaneously with the target, there is often some form of disruption of performance, apparently because attention is not sufficiently selective to eliminate all of the competition among internal recognition responses (C. W. Eriksen & Schultz, 1979;Grice & Gwynne, 1985;Proctor & Fober, 1985). Lavie (1995) and Lavie and Cox (1997), in studies of younger adults, found that when the distractor was identical to the target, the associated magnitude of distraction was variable, presumably because (unlike response-incompatible distractors) the disruptive influence of target-identical distractors was combined with priming from visual feature similarity.…”

Reading versus naming: The effect of target set size on contextual interference and facilitation

“…Eriksen & C. W. Eriksen, 1974;C. W. Eriksen & Schultz, 1979;Flowers & Wilcox, 1982;Grice, Boroughs, & Canham, 1984;Proctor & Fober, 1985;Taylor, 1977) and tasks referred to as "word-word variants of the Stroop task," in which one of two presented words has to be read aloud (e.g., M. O. Glaser & W. R. Glaser, 1982;La Heij, Van der Heijden, & Schreuder, 1985;Van der Heijden, 1981).…”

Effect on of familiarity and category contrast stimulus and response priming

“…The investigation of stimulus priming in the mixed-eategory task has received a great deal of attention in the recent literature because of the occurrence of an unexpected identity-suppression effect (Flowers & Wilcox, 1982;LaBerge, 1981;Proctor & Fober, 1985, 1988. Using a letter-digit mixed-category task these studies found that, with simultaneous presentation of the prime and target, RTs are slower on ill trials than on CS trials.…”

“…It may be noted that a number of researchers have investigated priming effects using the mixed-category task with letters and digits (Flowers & Wilcox, 1982;LaBerge, 1981;Proctor & Fober, 1985, 1988. With the excepon of the LaBerge paper, these studies failed to report separate statistical analyses of letter and digit targets.…”