Binding targets’ responses to distractors’ locations: Distractor response bindings in a location-priming task

Abstract

Responses to target stimuli can be encoded together with distracting objects accompanying these targets into a single stimulus-response episode or a single event file. Repeating any object of such an episode can trigger the response encoded in this episode. Hence, repeating a distractor may retrieve the response given to the target that was accompanied by this distractor. In the present experiments, we analyzed whether the binding of target responses to the distractor can be generalized even to the location of a distractor. In two experiments, we used a location-based prime-probe task and found that repeating the location of a distractor triggered the response to the target that had previously been accompanied by a distractor in the repeated location, even if the identity of the distractor changed from the prime to the probe.