Polarity correspondence effect between loudness and lateralized response set.

Seah Chang,Yang Seok Cho

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00683

Abstract

Performance is better when a high pitch tone is associated with an up or right response and a low pitch tone with a down or left response compared to the opposite pairs, which is called the spatial-musical association of response codes effect. The current study examined whether polarity codes are formed in terms of the variation in loudness. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which participants performed a loudness-judgment task and a timbre-judgment task respectively, the correspondence effect was obtained between loudness and response side regardless of whether loudness was relevant to the task or not. In Experiments 3 and 4, in which the identical loudness- and timbre-judgment tasks were conducted while the auditory stimulus was presented only to the left or right ear, the correspondence effect was modulated by the ear to which the stimulus was presented, even though the effect was marginally significant in Experiment 4. The results suggest that loudness produced polarity codes that influenced response selection (Experiments 1 and 2), and additional spatial codes provided by stimulus position modulated the effect, generating the stimulus eccentricity effect (Experiments 3 and 4), which is consistent with the polarity correspondence principle.

Highlights

Performance is better when stimulus and response alternatives spatially correspond with each other than when they do not
As in Experiment 1, an asymmetric effect was observed between loudright and soft-left mappings, which might have resulted from the additional processing benefits due to the + polarity codes themselves (Lakens, 2012)
The finding that the correspondence effect was obtained even when participants were required to focus not on the loudness of sound but on the timbre is in line with the results from Cho et al.’s (2012) Experiment 2 in that loudness was coded automatically relative to the referent even when the loudness of sound was irrelevant to the task

Summary

Introduction

Performance is better when stimulus and response alternatives spatially correspond with each other than when they do not. When a vertically arrayed stimulus set is coupled with a horizontally arrayed response set, an up-right/down-left advantage is obtained (Weeks and Proctor, 1990; Lippa and Adam, 2001). These various kinds of spatial SRC effect have been thought to be due to spatial coding of the stimulus and response alternatives (Umiltá and Nicoletti, 1990; Hommel, 1997). The spatial coding accounts suggest that spatial codes are formed with respect to multiple frames of reference, resulting in correspondence effects between stimulus and response spatial codes (Lamberts et al, 1992; Hommel and Lippa, 1995; Roswarski and Proctor, 1996; Adam et al, 1998; Cho and Proctor, 2003)

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