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Response mode modulates the congruency sequence effect in spatial conflict tasks: evidence from aimed-movement responses

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Abstract

The present study investigated how response mode determines the specificity of control responsible for the congruency sequence effect (CSE), especially when conflict arises from spatial dimensions. Horizontal and vertical Simon tasks were presented in turn, while response mode (Experiment 1) or task-relevant stimulus dimension (Experiment 2) was manipulated. All responses were made by aimed movements to make the relative salience of the horizontal and vertical dimensions equivalent regardless of response mode. The confound-minimized CSEs were significant only when the two tasks shared the same response mode, which did not vary as a function of task-relevant stimulus dimension. This result suggests that response mode determines the scope of control, as it reconfigures the representations of the task-irrelevant spatial dimensions (i.e., the horizontal and vertical dimensions), which is corroborated by distributional analyses. This response mode-specific control was also consistently found for the horizontal and vertical arrow versions of flanker-compatibility tasks in Experiment 3, in which conflict does not directly arise from the response dimension. Furthermore, the current findings revealed that the CSEs were more evident in movement times than in initiation times, which provides new insight on how control inhibits the response activated by a task-irrelevant stimulus dimension, especially at a motor level.

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Notes

  1. To prevent participants from explicitly selecting the correct response after releasing home key (Rubichi & Pellicano, 2004; Smith & Carew, 1987), the current study minimized the possibility of delayed response selection in the following ways. First, participants were explicitly instructed to release the home key after they decided which direction key to press. Also, the target disappeared from the screen as soon as the home key was released, which minimized the possibility that participants decided the response key after initiating movement (Smith & Carew, 1987). Finally, only those trials, of which both IT and MT were not too fast or slow from its conditional mean, were analyzed. In this way, the trials where the faster IT was traded for slower MT could be excluded from the analyses.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Robert Proctor for his detailed comments on a preliminary version of the paper. This research was supported by the Korean Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2016R1D1A1A09918865). The raw datasets and the analysis scripts are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/6jmpa/?view_only=ab275590e9a0478ea2679485f2c4f1a0.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul, 02841, Korea

    Chae Eun Lim & Yang Seok Cho

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Lim, C.E., Cho, Y.S. Response mode modulates the congruency sequence effect in spatial conflict tasks: evidence from aimed-movement responses. Psychological Research 85, 2047–2068 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01376-3

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