Abstract
Since its introduction by B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen (Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143–49, 1974), the flanker task has emerged as one of the most important experimental tasks in the history of cognitive psychology. The impact of a seemingly simple task design involving a target stimulus flanked on each side by a few task-irrelevant stimuli is astounding. It has inspired research across the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychophysiology, neurology, psychiatry, and sports science. In our tribute to Charles W. (“Erik”) Eriksen, we (1) review the seminal papers originating from his lab in the 1970s that launched the paradigmatic task and laid the foundation for studies of action control, (2) describe the inception of the arrow version of the Eriksen flanker task, (3) articulate the conceptual and neural models of action control that emerged from studies of the arrows flanker task, and (4) illustrate the influential role of the arrows flanker task in disclosing developmental trends in action control, fundamental deficits in action control due to neuropsychiatric disorders, and enhanced action control among elite athletes.
Highlights
Action control refers to a subset of adaptive cognitive control processes involved in the coordination of one’s instantaneous urges vis-à-vis actions that concord with our intentions or instructions
We provide a comprehensive review of published studies illustrating how the arrows flanker task has been used to investigate interference control in clinical populations, focusing primarily on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders (ADHD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD)
In the review presented in this article, we have attempted to describe the ontology of the arrows flanker task, to survey its applications over the 30 years since its inception, and to outline the impact it has made on the field of action control
Summary
In beginning of this paper, we mentioned a range of stimuli that had been substituted for letters in the Eriksen flanker task. Stoffels and van der Molen interpreted the observation of the typical Simon effect on congruent flanker trials and its reversal on incongruent flanker trials in terms of a crosstalk between the location information associated with the auditory stimulation on the one hand and the visual flanking arrows on the other. Ridderinkhof, van der Molen, and Bashore (1995) observed additive relations between variations in stimulus discriminability and S–R compatibility when target arrows were presented in isolation or flanked by response-neutral stimuli (♦, ↑, or ↓) These additive relations were transformed into overadditive relations when congruent as opposed to neutral flankers were presented, and into underadditive relations when incongruent flankers were presented, both of which are clear violations of stage robustness. This predicted pattern provides an accurate fit to the underadditive findings reported by Ridderinkhof, van der Molen, and Bashore (1995)
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