Ready to be distracted: Further evidence that the alerting-congruency interaction requires stimulus-response directional associations

Abstract

ABSTRACTPrevious research has found a greater congruency effect when participants are alerted in the Attention Network Test relative to situations where participants are not alerted. However, the interaction between alerting and congruency that has been reported with arrow stimuli as well as in the Simon task does not generalize to the Stroop task (Schneider, 2019). To test the hypothesis that the interaction between alerting and congruency requires pre-existing directional associations, Experiment 1 (N = 40) used numeric stimuli since numbers are associated with spatial directions (i.e., the SNARC effect; spatial-numerical association of response codes). Results show the typical interaction between congruency and alerting. Experiment 2 (N = 40) further tested this by replacing numeric stimuli with characters that do not have directional associations and the interaction disappeared. Together these data support the proposal that alerting boosts stimulus processing, which facilitates responses to the target, but also enhances stimulus-response directional associations, which magnifies effects of the distractors.