Stimulus decay functions in action control

Abstract

When facing particular combinations of stimuli and responses, people create temporary event-files integrating the corresponding stimulus and response features. Subsequent repetition of one or more of these features retrieves the entire event-file, which impairs performance if not all features are repeated (partial-repetition costs). In the literature, different decay functions have been reported presumably dependent on the type of feature that is repeated (e.g. target vs. distractor features). Here, we use a variant of the S1R1-S2R2 and distractor-response binding task and analyze for the first time target-based and distractor-based event-file decay functions within the same task and sample. While we found evidence for decay functions and also stronger retrieval due to target than distractor repetitions, slopes of the decay functions were comparable suggesting that the decay process itself is equal irrespective of the type of stimulus feature that is repeated. Our study thereby confirms overarching approaches that summarize paradigm specific findings with the same set of core processes.