Abstract
Numerous studies have shown that stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) effects in the go-nogo version of the Simon task can be elicited as a result of performing the task together with another human or non-human agent (e.g., a Japanese-waving-cat, a working-clock, or a ticking-metronome). A parsimonious explanation for both social and non-social SRC effects is that highlighting the spatial significance of alternative (non-/social) action events makes action selection more difficult. This holds even when action events are task-irrelevant. Recent findings, however, suggest that this explanation holds only for cases of a modality correspondence between the Simon task as such (i.e., auditory or visual) and the alternative (non-/social) action event that needs to be discriminated. However, based on the fact that perception and action are represented by the same kind of codes, an event that makes the go-nogo decision more challenging should impact go-nogo Simon task performance. To tackle this issue, the present study tested if alternative stimulus events that come from a different sensory modality do impact SRC effects in the go-nogo version of the Simon task. This was tested in the presence and absence of alternative action events of a human co-actor. In a multimodal (auditory–visual) go-nogo Simon paradigm, participants responded to their assigned stimulus – e.g., a single auditory stimulus while ignoring the alternative visual stimulus or vice versa – in the presence or absence of a human co-actor (i.e., joint and single go-nogo condition). Results showed reliable SRCs in both, single and joint go-nogo Simon task conditions independent of the modality participants had to respond to. Although a correspondence between stimulus material and attention-grabbing event might be an efficient condition for SRCs to emerge, the driving force underlying the emergence of SRCs rather appears to be whether the attentional focus prevents or facilitates alternative events to be integrated. Thus, under task conditions in which the attentional focus is sufficiently broad to enable the integration and thus cognitive representation of alternative events, go-nogo decisions become more difficult, resulting in reliable SRCs in single and joint go-nogo Simon tasks.
Highlights
In the last 15 years, cognitive scientists have invested much effort into investigating how and to what extent people mentally represent their own and other people’s actions/tasks and how these cognitive representations influence an individual’s own behavior when interacting with another person
To investigate the stimulus-response compatibility (SRC), correct reaction time (RT) were submitted to an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Compatibility, and Condition as within-subjects factors and Modality as a between-subjects factor
This 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of Compatibility, F(1,38) = 95.42, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.72, showing that responses were faster with stimulus-response compatibility than with stimulus-response incompatibility1
Summary
In the last 15 years, cognitive scientists have invested much effort into investigating how and to what extent people mentally represent their own and other people’s actions/tasks and how these cognitive representations influence an individual’s own behavior when interacting with another person. In the standard Simon task, single participants execute spatially defined actions in response to non-spatial stimulus features (e.g., “Press right in response to the high-pitched tone and press left in response to the low-pitched tone). In the case of a spatial match between the automatically activated and the assigned response, task performance is facilitated, whereas performance is impaired in the case of a spatial mismatch (Kornblum et al, 1990) This stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect, known as the Simon effect (Simon, 1969; for reviews, see Proctor and Vu, 2006; Rubichi et al, 2006; Hommel, 2011), does typically not occur if the task is turned into a go-nogo task by having the participant execute single key presses in response to only a specific stimulus feature (i.e., a single tone/color; Hommel, 1996). An SRC re-emerges if the participant shares the same go-nogo task with another participant who responds to the other stimulus by operating the other response key–a phenomenon known as the social/joint SRC (Sebanz et al, 2003)
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