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On the time-course of automatic response activation in the Simon task

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Abstract

The Simon effect (prolonged RT when the task-irrelevant stimulus location is incongruent with the response side) has been reported to decrease at longer RTs, which is reflected in negative-going delta functions. This finding has been attributed to gradual dissipation of the response automatically activated by the task-irrelevant location information. The Diffusion Model for Conflict Tasks (DMC, Ulrich, Schröter, Leuthold, & Birngruber, Cognitive Psychology 78:148–174, 2015) formally specifies the time-course of this automatic activation process as a pulse-like function. In contrast to alternative views, DMC is consistent with the notion that this time-course is unaffected by the presentation duration of the target stimulus. Therefore, we expected that delta functions are invariant against changes of stimulus duration. This prediction was verified in two Simon task experiments. Consistent with this general result, DMC’s parameter τ which defines the time-course of the automatic response activation was estimated to not meaningfully differ between short and long durations. We argue that our results are coherent with processing architectures that assume a transient automatic process that is virtually unaffected by stimulus duration.

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Notes

  1. For stability analysis, we explored whether our main results would remain unchanged when DPs are constructed with a different number of percentiles. Therefore, we conducted the same analysis with 5 percentiles (quintiles) and 19 percentiles (ventiles). Most important and analogous to the analysis reported in the main body of the text, the threefold interaction between stimulus duration, congruency, and percentile was insignificant with 5 and 19 percentiles F(4, 76) = 1.23, p = .293 and F(18, 342) = 0.91, p = .404, respectively, while the twofold interaction of congruency and percentile was significant with 5 bins F(4, 76) = 9.13, p = .001 and also with 19 bins, F(18, 342) = 7.33, p < .001.

  2. Like in Experiment 1, we examined whether our main results would remain unchanged when DPs are constructed with 5 percentiles (quintiles) and 19 percentiles (ventiles). Again, the threefold interaction between stimulus duration, congruency, and percentile was insignificant with 5 and 19 percentiles F(4, 76) = 1.25, p = .297 and F(18, 342) = 0.69, p = .510, respectively, while the twofold interaction of congruency and percentile was significant with both 5 and 19 percentiles, F(4, 76) = 15.55, p < .001, and F(18, 342) = 12.13, p < .001, respectively.

  3. We are well aware of the possibility that the true effect may be too small to be detected by the present experiments due to insufficient statistical power. Power calculations with the function “pwr.f2.test” of the R package “pwr” reveal a power of approximately 87% for detecting a medium effect (i.e., Cohen’s f2 = 0.15) after correcting the degrees of freedom for violation of sphericity (i.e., ε = 0.6, estimated from our results) according to (Geisser & Greenhouse, **1958). Therefore, the probability of detecting a medium effect (i.e., f2 = 0.35; Cohen, 1988) in at least of one of the two experiments would be 1-(1-0.87)2 = 0.98. A similar calculation shows that a sample size of n = 117 per experiment would be required to detect a small effect (f2 = 0.02) with probability 95% in at least of one of the two experiments assuming again ε = 0.6.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by DFG Grant BA 4110/5-2. We thank Birte Forstmann and Ronald Hübner for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

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  1. Psychological Institute, University of Tübingen, Schleichstrasse 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Ruben Ellinghaus, Matthias Karlbauer, Karin M. Bausenhart & Rolf Ulrich

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  1. Ruben Ellinghaus
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  2. Matthias Karlbauer
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Correspondence to Ruben Ellinghaus.

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Ellinghaus, R., Karlbauer, M., Bausenhart, K.M. et al. On the time-course of automatic response activation in the Simon task. Psychological Research 82, 734–743 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0860-z

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