Theoretical issues in stimulus-response compatibility: Editors' introduction

Abstract

Although the term “stimulus–response compatibility” had been coined and already introduced by Small in 1951, the real spark for compatibility research were the now classic papers by Fitts and Seeger (1953) and Fitts and Deininger (1954). The important finding of Fitts and colleagues was that human performance is not only affected by characteristics of the stimulus set and the response set used in a task, but by the combination of the sets as well. In particular, performance was shown to be systematically affected by (1) whether or not a set of stimuli shares one or more features with the response set and (2) the way in which the particular stimuli and responses are mapped onto each other. Since then, the effect of stimulus–response (S–R) mapping with feature-overlapping stimulus and response sets has been called the “S–R compatibility effect.” Besides specifying mechanisms and processing routes, the temporal dynamics of information processing—that is, the changes in the activation of cognitive codes over time—has increasingly gained attention.