The effect of an irrelevant directional cue on choice reaction time: Duration of the phenomenon and its relation to stages of processing

Simon, Jessica; Acosta, Enrique; Mewaldt, Steven P.; Speidel, Cynthia R.

doi:10.3758/bf03199380

Cited by 134 publications

(104 citation statements)

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“…Standard left-right Simon effect For the left-right Simon effect with keypresses, one corroborating finding already mentioned is that of Simon et al (1976), showing that the visual Simon effect was eliminated when the response had to be withheld until a spatially neutral go signal occurred. In more detail, in Simon et al's Experiment 1, participants performed the standard color version of the Simon task, with the major alteration being that a tone occurred as a go signal to respond after a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 0, 150, 250, or 350 ms, randomly intermixed.…”

Section: Converging Behavioral Evidencesupporting

confidence: 77%

Section: Distributional Analyses Of the Simon Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evidence for the two components being distinct was provided through the Hedge and Marsh reversal, which we discuss in the next section. Second, De Jong et al (1994) noted findings of Simon, Acosta, Mewaldt, and Speidel (1976) showing that the visual Simon effect was eliminated when a delay of 250 or 350 ms between stimulus onset and a go signal to respond was instituted.The third, and main, reason for De Jong et al's (1994) conclusion that the distribution analyses provided reliable estimates of the time course was the outcome of Monte Carlo simulations that they reported in an Appendix. These simulations were conducted to establish conditions that might yield decreasing Simon effect functions for reasons other than temporal activation properties.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

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Since 1994, group reaction time (RT) distribution analyses of spatial correspondence effects have been used to evaluate the dynamics of the spatial Simon effect, a benefit of correspondence of stimulus location information with response location for tasks in which stimulus location is irrelevant. We review the history and justification for analyzing group RT distributions and clarify which conditions result in the Simon effect decreasing across the distribution and which lead to flat or increasing functions. Although the standard left-right Simon effect typically yields a function for which the effect decreases as RT increases, in most other task variations, the Simon effect remains stable or increases across the RT distribution. Studies that have used other means of evaluating the temporal dynamics of the Simon effect provide converging evidence that the changes in the Simon effect across the distribution are due mainly to temporal activation properties, an issue that has been a matter of some dispute.Keywords Correspondence effects . Delta plots . Simon effect . Stimulus-response compatibility . Time course of processing In the late 1960s and early 1970s, J. R. Simon reported the results of reaction time (RT) studies in which participants made a left or right manual response to a feature of a stimulus (e.g., red-green color of a visual stimulus) presented in a left or a right location (see Fig. 1; see, e.g., Simon & Small, 1969; see Simon, 1990, for a review). RT was shorter when stimulus and response locations corresponded than when they did not, a result called the Simon effect (Hedge & Marsh, 1975). This two-choice task has come to be prototypical, and we refer to it and the resulting Simon effect as standard. The term Simon effect has been extended to include correspondence effects for other irrelevant stimulus dimensions that overlap with, or are similar to, a response dimension (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990), but we focus on task variations that entail correspondence of spatial information and manual responses.Studies of the Simon effect and related correspondence effects focused on differences in mean RT at first (see Lu & Proctor, 1995), and these differences are still the focal point of a lot of investigations. However, beginning with De Jong, Liang, and Lauber (1994), many authors have also reported analyses of the RT distributions, dividing them into quantiles, or bins, that contain RTs in the range of percentile values (e.g., between the 50th and 60th percentiles) and measuring the Simon effect for each bin. De Jong et al. (1994) found that the Simon effect for visual tasks was largest at the short RT bins and decreased across the distribution. This result has typically been attributed to rapid activation of the response code corresponding to the irrelevant location feature, followed by decrease of that activation. But, this temporal activation account has been debated (e.g., Roswarski & Proctor, 2003;Zhang & Kornblum, 1997), and the pattern of decreasing effect size across the RT di...

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Section: Converging Behavioral Evidencesupporting

confidence: 77%

Section: Distributional Analyses Of the Simon Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

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“…The RCE is usually associated with the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) and with variants of this task, such as the flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974) or the Simon task (Simon, Acosta, Mewaldt, & Speidel, 1976), in which the distractor is presented together with the target stimulus and remains on the screen until the participant reacts. For these tasks, just as in our experiments, it has been shown that the RCE is clearest when the distractors are part of the target set (Roelofs, 1993) but that a smaller effect can sometimes be obtained with distractors that do not belong to the target set (Glaser & Glaser, 1989;La Heij, 1988;Miller, 1987;Proctor, 1978).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic stimulus-response associations may be semantically mediated

Reynvoet

Caessens

Brysbaert

2002

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Until a few years ago, perception of visual stimuli and selection of motor responses were considered as autonomous processing stages. For instance, Kahneman and Treisman (1984) suggested that the information about a visual stimulus in an experimental task is integrated into an episodic object file, which contains the visual features of the object, together with information about the location of the stimulus. Only when processing in the perceptual stage is finished is the information translated into specific response codes. In recent years, however, evidence has accumulated that object files contain not only perceptual information, but also response-related information. Treisman (1992) argued that repeated experience with objects leads to an integration of stimulus features with task or response information, and Danzinger and Robertson (1994) showed that the benefits of stimulus feature repetition depended on a consistent stimulus-response mapping. Probably the strongest antimodularity view of stimulusresponse associationsis the theory of event coding proposed by Hommel (1998aHommel ( , 1998b. According to this theory, an experimentaltask does not result in the creation of episodic object files but in the creation of episodic event files that integrate information about both the stimulus features and the accompanying response codes, so that response codes are immediately and automatically activated. Dehaene et al. (1998) reported an fMRI study that seems to agree more with Hommel's (1998aHommel's ( , 1998b theory than with the traditional modularity view. Participants had to judge whether a number was larger or smaller than 5 by pressing a key with the left or the right hand. Before each target, a prime was presented that in half of the trials was associated with the same response (i.e., both smaller or larger than 5) and in half of the trials with a different response (e.g., prime smaller than 5 and target larger than 5). The data showed a strong response compatibilityeffect (RCE): Responses to targets were faster when the primes were associated with the same response than when the primes asked for a different response. Brain-imaging data showed that the difference between compatible and incompatible trials was not limited to the visual and the association areas but could be traced well into the motor cortex, indicating that the primes had activated their accompanying response code. This is the more interesting because the authors presented the primes tachistoscopically immediately before the target, so that the participants could not use deliberate guessing strategies, and the response activation thus had to be an automatic process (see Neely, 1991, for a distinctionbetween automatic and strategic processes in priming).In this paper, we first describe a numerical task that evoked the same pattern of behavioral results as Dehaene et al. 's (1998), and then we show that the RCE we observed was not based solely on a learned association between stimulus-specific physical features and response codes but stemmed from...

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“…The RTs for the binocular trials were even faster than those for the monocular trials on which stimulus and response locations corresponded, suggesting that the Simon effect is due primarily to interference that occurs when the stimulus and response locations do not correspond rather than to facilitation for trials on which they do. Whether there is a facilitatory component to the Simon effect is an issue that is not completely settled (see, e.g., Hommel, 1993b;Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990), but the term interference is often used to refer to the difference in RTs between mappings for which stimulus-response (S-R) locations do and do not correspond (e.g., Simon, Acosta, Mewaldt, & Speidel, 1976).…”

Section: Mw) / _mentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of irrelevant location information on performance: A review of the Simon and spatial Stroop effects

1995

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of irrelevant location information on performance of visual choice-reaction tasks. We review empirical findings and theoretical explanations from two domains, those of the Simon effect and the spatial Stroop effect, in which stimulus location has been shown to affect reaction time when irrelevant to the task. Wethen integrate the findings and explanations from the two domains to clarify how and why stimulus location influences performance even when it is uninformative to the correct response. Factors that influence the processing of irrelevant location information include response modality, relative timing with respect to the relevant information, spatial coding, and allocation of attention. The most promising accounts are offered by models in which response selection is a function of (1) strength of association of the irrelevant stimulus information with the response and (2) temporal overlap of the resulting response activation with that produced by the relevant stimulus information.The role played by stimulus location in visual information processing has been a controversial issue. This issue has been investigated primarily by means ofvisual search tasks in which a target stimulus in an array of distractors must be detected or identified. Reaction time (RT) in such tasks is typically an increasing function ofarray size, and accuracy a decreasing function, when the target is defined by a conjunction of features (e.g., Treisman & Gelade, 1980;Van Zandt & Townsend, 1993), leading some authors to propose that attending to location is necessary for feature integration (e.g., Nissen, 1985;Treisman & Gelade, 1980). As expected if location must be attended in such situations, a stimulus for a second task shows a processing benefit when it occurs in a location adjacent to the target stimulus of the search task rather than in a more remote location (e.g., Hoffman & Nelson, 1981), and precuing the location in the array in which the target stimulus will occur facilitates its processing (e.g., Eriksen & Hoffman, 1972). However, facilitation from a location precue is also apparent when the target is presented alone and requires only a detection response (e.g., Bashinski & Bacharach, 1980;Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980), suggesting that it may be necessary to attend to the locaWe would like to thank Bernhard Hommel, Colin MacLeod, Bob Melara, Jim Neely, Richard Schweickert, Richard Simon, and Howard Zelaznik for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Reprint requests should be sent to Chen-Hui Lu, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, or Robert W. Proctor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1364. tion of any stimulus on which a response is based. Consistent with this possibility, Tsal and Lavie (1993) recently showed that when the relevant feature of a precue stimulus is nonspatial (e.g., color), there is still facilitation in the identification of a s...

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The effect of an irrelevant directional cue on choice reaction time: Duration of the phenomenon and its relation to stages of processing

Cited by 134 publications

References 11 publications

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

Automatic stimulus-response associations may be semantically mediated

The influence of irrelevant location information on performance: A review of the Simon and spatial Stroop effects

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