Reduction of the Spatial Stroop Effect by Peripheral Cueing as a Function of the Presence/Absence of Placeholders

Chunming Luo,Xiaolan Fu,María Jesús Funes,Juan Lupiáñez,Michael J Proulx

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069456

Chunming Luo, Xiaolan Fu + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0069456

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Abstract

In a paradigm combining spatial Stroop with spatial cueing, the current study investigated the role of the presence vs. absence of placeholders on the reduction of the spatial Stroop effect by peripheral cueing. At a short cue-target interval, the modulation of peripheral cueing over the spatial Stroop effect was observed independently of the presence/absence of placeholders. At the long cue-target interval, however, this modulation over the spatial Stroop effect only occurred in the placeholders-present condition. These findings show that placeholders are modulators but not mediators of the reduction of the spatial Stroop effect by peripheral cueing, which further favor the cue-target integration account.

Highlights

The spatial coding of location is an important cognitive skill
We found that the same was true for the placeholder- absent display, as the cueing effects did not revert into IOR at the long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)
For the placeholder-present display, the modulation of the spatial Stroop effect by cueing occurred at the short and at the long SOA, while for the placeholder-absent display, this modulation just occurred at the short SOA, even though cueing effect was facilitatory at the both SOAs

Summary

Introduction

How its mental representation is built up and how this representation affects organization of actions have attracted considerable research interest. Spatial coding of this type has been examined in a variety of conflicting tasks used to examine spatial congruency effects, including stimulus-stimulus (S-S) congruency effects, such as the spatial Stroop effect (SSE), and the stimulusresponse (S–R) congruency effect, as in the case of the Simon effect [1,2,3]. These spatial congruency effects suggest that the spatial location coding of an object is automatic, as it usually affects performance even when the location is entirely irrelevant to the defined task [5,7]

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