Abstract
Charles W. Eriksen dedicated much of his research career to the field of cognitive psychology, investigating human information processing in those situations that required selection between competing stimuli. Together with his wife Barbara, he introduced the flanker task, which became one of the standard experimental tasks used by researchers to investigate the mechanisms underpinning selection. Although Eriksen himself was primarily interested in investigating visual selection, the flanker task was eventually adapted by other researchers to investigate human information processing and selection in a variety of nonvisual and multisensory situations. Here, we discuss the core aspects of the flanker task and interpret the evidence of the flanker task when used in crossmodal and multisensory settings. “Selection” has been a core topic of psychology for nearly 120 years. Nowadays, though, it is clear that we need to look at selection from a multisensory perspective—the flanker task, at least in its crossmodal and multisensory variants, is an important tool with which to investigate selection, attention, and multisensory information processing.
Highlights
The task-relevant stimulus was defined by its spatial location, and three distracting stimuli were presented on either side of the target, flanking the central target stimulus (e.g., BBBABBB), which subsequently led to this being named the flanker task
By reviewing the existing literature, it soon becomes clear that the simple generalization of evidence from one sensory modality to the other (e.g., Chan et al, 2005; Driver & Grossenbacher, 1996; Fox, 1998; Miller, 1991), or from unisensory to crossmodal and/or multisensory settings, falls short when explicitly tested (e.g., Guerreiro et al, 2010)
The interplay of attention and multisensory processing is perhaps best studied with experimental tasks that can disentangle task relevance from attention
Summary
In the classic version of the flanker task, only a small set of possible target stimuli are chosen. The distractor stimuli are chosen from a new stimulus set bearing no relation to the possible responses or, on occasion, no distractor is presented at all This experimental design constitutes the core of the flanker task, as it allows for the analysis of the existence of any influence of the distracting information. The relative frequency with which specific trial types are presented as well as the inclusion or exclusion of specific trial types within the same experimental block seems to influence the actual task performance during otherwise identical trials This might be due to an attentional/informational shift between the competing stimuli or an updating of prior expectations (e.g., Gau & Noppenay, 2016), possibly relating to more general cognitive mechanisms like curiosity exploration (Berlyne, 1960) or mental and behavioral flexibility (Hommel, 2015). This possibility was often used in the investigations of distractor processing outside the visual modality, as our review in the subsequent section will show
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