Stimulus Intensity and Adaptation Level As Determinants of Simple Reaction Time.

Kohfeld, David L.

doi:10.1037/h0021285

Cited by 27 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Two studies (Kohfeld, 1968;Murray & Kohfeld, 1965) have investigated the effect of preadaptation to tones of various intensities on simple auditory RT. Before performing a reaction time task, subjects listened to 12 tones presented once every 20 sec.…”

Section: Pure Strong Blocksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus intensity and information processing

Nissen

1977

Perception & Psychophysics

137

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The physiological and behavioral literature regarding effects of stimulus intensity on the time course of information processing is reviewed. The physiological data describe intensity effects on the sensory pathway. Reaction time studies show that the effect of intensity on behavioral responses also depends on and may be mediated by more cognitive processes. The degree to which intensity affects simple reaction time varies directly with the response criterion subjects use. The lack of this dependence in choice reaction time may indicate different intensity effects on energy and nonenergy pathways. The literature suggests that intensity affects the time course of information processing not only by influencing the speed of processing in sensory pathways, but also by affecting alertness and the time required to direct attention to a stimulus.Stimulus intensity has been used extensively as an independent variable in psychological research, but· its use has been most closely associated with the field of psychophysics. As part of their general interest in the relation between stimulus magnitude and subjective magnitude, psychophysicists have relentlessly searched for the true law relating stimulus intensity to perceived intensity. There has been no doubt that the relationship is nonlinear. Rather, the questions have involved the type of nonlinearity that best describes the psychophysical data (logarithmic vs. power functions), the level in the processing system at which the nonlinear transformation occurs, and the dependence of the input-output relationship on such things as stimulus modality, duration, and size.The thoroughness of the psychophysicists' investigations of the effect of stimulus intensity on perceived intensity has not been paralleled by investigations of intensity effects on other psychological processes. It has been known since 1886 that reaction time decreases with stimulus intensity (Cattell, 1886). Recent studies in cognitive psychology have concentrated not on understanding how intensity affects reaction time but instead on using manipulation of intensity as a tool with which to investigate other cognitive factors. In Sternberg's (1969) influential stage model of information processing, stimulus intensity is explicitly assumed to affect only the earliest stages of encoding. Without questioning this assumption, psychologists have used intensity manipulations within the framework of the additive factors logic (Sternberg, 1969), arguing that any variable which interacts withThe author wishes to thank Michael 1. Posner and Richard T. Marrocco for helpful comments on this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Mary Jo Nissen, Eye Research Laboratories, The University of Chicago, 950 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. 338 stimulus intensity must also affect encoding. Considering the number of theoretical arguments that have been based on the assumption that intensity only affects the earliest stage of processing, it is important to know, specifically, whether that assumption is valid, an...

show abstract

Section: Pure Strong Blocksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus intensity and information processing

Nissen

1977

Perception & Psychophysics

137

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although there are many accounts of how temporal learning emerges (e.g., Grice, 1968;Kohfeld, 1968;Ollman & Billington, 1972), we focus on just one for expositional simplicity. Other accounts, however, would have similar implications for the CSE.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congruency sequence effects and previous response times: conflict adaptation or temporal learning?

Schmidt

Weissman

2015

Psychological Research

106

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the present study, we followed up on a recent report of two experiments in which the congruency sequence effect -the reduction of the congruency effect after incongruent relative to congruent trials in Stroop-like tasks -was observed without feature repetition or contingency learning confounds. Specifically, we further scrutinized these data to determine the plausibility of a temporal learning account as an alternative to the popular conflict adaptation account. To this end, we employed a linear mixed effects model to investigate the role of previous response time in producing the congruency sequence effect, because previous response time is thought to influence temporal learning. Interestingly, slower previous response times were associated with a reduced current-trial congruency effect, but only when the previous trial was congruent. An adapted version of the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP) model was able to fit these data if it was additionally assumed that attention "wanders" during different parts of the experiment (e.g., due to fatigue or other factors). Consistent with this assumption, the magnitude of the congruency effect was correlated across small blocks of trials. These findings demonstrate that a temporal learning mechanism provides a plausible account of the congruency sequence effect.

show abstract

“…This produces a small cost for high intensity tones and an especially large cost for low intensity tones. Although there are other mechanistic QUESTIONING CONFLICT ADAPTATION 13 accounts of mixing costs (e.g., Kohfeld, 1968;Ollman & Billington, 1972;Strayer & Kramer 1994a, 1994bVan Duren & Sanders, 1988), the general idea in the literature is that participants are able to alter when (e.g., after how much evidence) they anticipate being able to respond.Like contingency learning, temporal learning has an adaptive value. For instance, the Adaptation to the Statistics of the Environment (ASE) model (Mozer, Kinoshita, & Davis, 2004; see also, Kinoshita, Forster, & Mozer, 2008;Kinoshita, Mozer, & Forster, 2011) explains temporal learning in terms of the need to balance speed and accuracy (see also, the decision model of Mozer, Colagrosso, & Huber, 2002).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Questioning conflict adaptation: proportion congruent and Gratton effects reconsidered

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Conflict adaptation is one of the most popular ideas in cognitive psychology. It purports to explain a wide range of data, including both brain and behavioural data from the proportion congruent and Gratton paradigms. However, in recent years many concerns about the viability of this account have been raised. It has been argued that contingency learning, not conflict adaptation, produces the proportion congruent effect. Similarly, the Gratton paradigm has been shown to contain several confounds, most notably feature repetition biases. Newer work on temporal learning further questions the interpretability of the behavioural results of conflict adaptation studies. Brain data linking supposed conflict adaptation to the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC) has also come into question, as this area seems to be solely responsive to time-ontask rather than conflict. This review points to the possibility that conflict adaptation may simply be an illusion. However, the extant data remain ambiguous and there are a lot of open questions that still need to be addressed in future research. QUESTIONING CONFLICT ADAPTATION 3 Questioning Conflict Adaptation: Proportion Congruent and Gratton Effects ReconsideredThe role of cognitive control in basic mental functions is one of the primary questions of interest for cognitive psychologists. One of the most popular ideas in the literature is conflict adaptation, the idea that we deal with conflict between stimuli in our environment by shifting attention away from the source of conflict and toward the stimulus we wish to process. The Stroop paradigm (Stroop, 1935) offers the most common way of studying conflict adaptation. In this task, participants identify the print colour of a colour word. Response times and error rates are increased to incongruent stimuli (e.g., the word BLUE printed in red; BLUE red ) relative to congruent stimuli (e.g., BLUE blue ). Other commonly used paradigms included the Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974), in which congruent or incongruent distracting letters (or words) are presented on either side of a centrally-located target letter (or word); and the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967), in which a distracting stimulus location is either congruent or incongruent with the response that needs to be made to the target (e.g., a left keypress for a stimulus on the right side of the screen). In paradigms such as these, evidence for conflict adaptation comes from the observation that the size of the congruency effect can be altered in response to changes in conflict. In particular, this paper discusses the proportion congruent and Gratton paradigms.Conflict adaptation theory has a lot of explanatory power. However, the goal of this paper is to explore whether or not conflict adaptation must be assumed in order to explain such phenomena as the proportion congruent and Gratton effects. Some of the mounting evidence against the highly popular conflict adaptation account will be discussed and it will be argued that simpler, non-conflict learning and...

show abstract

Stimulus Intensity and Adaptation Level As Determinants of Simple Reaction Time.

Cited by 27 publications

References 5 publications

Stimulus intensity and information processing

Stimulus intensity and information processing

Congruency sequence effects and previous response times: conflict adaptation or temporal learning?

Questioning conflict adaptation: proportion congruent and Gratton effects reconsidered

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About