Attention meets binding: Only attended distractors are used for the retrieval of event files

Abstract

Response-irrelevant stimuli can be encoded with, and later on retrieve, a response given to a relevant stimulus, an effect that is called distractor-response binding. In three experiments using a prime-probe design, we investigated whether the allocation of attention modulates the processes contributing to distractor-response binding. Participants identified letters via keypresses while attending to one of two sets of simultaneously presented but response-irrelevant number stimuli. In different experiments, both spatial attention and feature-based attention were allocated to the response-irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that only attended response-irrelevant stimuli elicited effects of distractor-response binding. In particular, while the encoding of response-irrelevant stimuli and responses was not particularly affected by attention during prime processing, only attended response-irrelevant stimuli in the probe retrieved previous responses. Hence, we show that attention affects action regulation due to modulating the influence of stimulus-response binding on behavior.