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You can’t ignore what you can’t separate: the effect of visually induced target-distractor separation on tactile selection

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Abstract

Research suggests that vision of the body-part that happens to receive a tactile event enhances the processing of this stimulus. However, it would appear that only tactile distractors delivered to visible body-parts are processed up to the level of response selection. Here, we analyze whether vision or higher order cognitive processes influence the processing of tactile distractors. We compared the processing of distractors in a tactile variant of the Eriksen flanker task when the body-parts receiving target and distractor stimuli were separated by different types of barriers. Surprisingly, an impermeable barrier prevented tactile distractors from being processed up to the response level, irrespective of whether the barrier was transparent or opaque. By contrast, when an empty frame was placed between the participant’s hands, distractors were processed up to the level of response selection. Hence, higher order cognition (here the visually induced representation of the target-distractor separation) influences the processing of tactile distractors. We discuss these results in the light of related findings from selective reaching experiments as well as in terms of Gestalt grouping.

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Notes

  1. One may wonder why occluder type did not modulate the average performance (irrespective of the flanker effects); i.e., it could be argued that target processing per se should be influenced by the occluder type, perhaps the strongest in the condition with a centrally presented target hand. We therefore selectively compared the mean accuracy between the opaque-occluder and no-occluder conditions only for target central trials – in which the direction of gaze as well as the occlusion of the distractor from view might be expected to facilitate target processing. However, still no significant influence of the occluder was observed, t <1 (t <1, also for mean RTs). We replicated this result in a control experiment (n =36) contrasting a no-occluder condition to a condition in which the distractor hand was positioned 40 cm apart from the body midline under an occluder box, and was additionally separated from the target by means of an opaque shield positioned between the hands. Still, the opaque and no-occluder conditions of the control experiment did not differ with regard to the mean accuracy or the mean reaction times, both ts <1. We therefore suggest that these null-effects of the occluder manipulation on the overall performance are likely attributable to the complex stimulus materials and the resulting quite long response times (on average >1900 ms).

  2. Interestingly, the introduction of a transparent barrier revealed no different effects on visuotactile interactions as compared to a condition without a barrier in the crossmodal congruency task (e.g., Kitagawa & Spence, 2005; see also Farnè, Demattè, & Làdavas, 2003). In a nutshell, one may conclude that congruency across modalities is differently affected by higher-order cognition than selection within a modality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ann-Katrin Wesslein & Charles Spence

  2. Department of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany

    Ann-Katrin Wesslein & Christian Frings

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  1. Ann-Katrin Wesslein
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  2. Charles Spence
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  3. Christian Frings
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Correspondence to Ann-Katrin Wesslein.

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Wesslein, AK., Spence, C. & Frings, C. You can’t ignore what you can’t separate: the effect of visually induced target-distractor separation on tactile selection. Psychon Bull Rev 22, 728–736 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0738-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-014-0738-7

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