Estimating the quantitative relation between incongruent information and response time

Abstract

In Eriksen’s flanker paradigm, participants’ responses are slower and more error-prone when task-relevant and simultaneously available task-irrelevant cues are incongruent. The influence of task-irrelevant information decreases as its distance from the task-relevant information increases. Here, we manipulated the quantity of task-irrelevant information while keeping the distance constant. We asked whether when the impact on response selection processes was stronger the more incongruent information was available, or whether the impact on response selection depended only on its presence or absence. We conducted an experiment, in which subjects had to discriminate the direction of motion of a central point-light-walker that was flanked by two, four, or eight point-light-walkers at an equal distance from the center. The experiment showed that reaction times increased with the number of incongruent walkers. This effect was modulated by the total number of walkers, showing that the effect of incongruent information saturates when the display is cluttered.