Abstract
We investigated the influence of hand posture in handedness recognition, while varying the spatial correspondence between stimulus and response in a modified Simon task. Drawings of the left and right hands were displayed either in a back or palm view while participants discriminated stimulus handedness by pressing either a left or right key with their hands resting either in a prone or supine posture. As a control, subjects performed a regular Simon task using simple geometric shapes as stimuli. Results showed that when hands were in a prone posture, the spatially corresponding trials (i.e., stimulus and response located on the same side) were faster than the non-corresponding trials (i.e., stimulus and response on opposite sides). In contrast, for the supine posture, there was no difference between corresponding and non-corresponding trials. Control experiments with the regular Simon task showed that the posture of the responding hand had no influence on performance. When the stimulus is the drawing of a hand, however, the posture of the responding hand affects the spatial correspondence effect because response location is coded based on multiple reference points, including the body of the hand.
Highlights
In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, compatibility between elements of the stimulus and response sets influences performance, as measured by the speed and accuracy of the subject’s motor response (e.g., Kornblum et al, 1990)
ANALYSES Central tendency measurements The mean of correct Manual Reaction Time (MRT) values was entered into an ANOVA with one between-participant factor, task (Handedness task and regular Simon task) and two withinparticipant factors, hand posture and correspondence
In the regular Simon task, for both postures, MRTs for the corresponding condition were faster than MRTs for the non-corresponding condition.The Delta-plot analysis confirmed this pattern and showed it was not affected by response speed
Summary
In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, compatibility between elements of the stimulus and response sets influences performance, as measured by the speed and accuracy of the subject’s motor response (e.g., Kornblum et al, 1990). Because visual objects are seen from different viewpoints, they must first be subjected to mental transformations aimed at reorienting them in space Such strategy, in the case of body parts, is complicated by the fact that their internal representation is built from visual and somatosensory information (Schendan and Stern, 2007). The basic assumption that motivated the current study was that the confirmatory motor imagery process (second phase) necessary for handedness recognition might be influenced by proprioceptive inputs. The spatial correspondence effect, characteristic of regular S-R compatibility tasks occurs because irrelevant information about the stimulus location interferes, at the response selection stage, with the learned association between the relevant stimulus feature and the correct response. We asked how those two irrelevant sources of information interacted with each other and with the relevant feature to affect the dynamics of the response in a handedness judgment task
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