Eriksen flanker delta plot shapes depend on the stimulus
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Eriksen flanker delta plot shapes depend on the stimulus Michael S. Pratte1 Accepted: 18 September 2020 © The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Several experimental paradigms are purported to measure response conflict, including the Stroop, Simon, and Eriksen flanker tasks. Although these tasks are often treated as being similar, delta plot analyses of response time distributions have revealed marked differences across them. Several theories have been proposed to explain these differences, however, assessing their veracity is difficult given the numerous differences across tasks. To explore what might cause delta plots to differ in a more controlled manner, here stimulus materials were manipulated across four Eriksen flanker tasks. The results reveal substantially different delta plot shapes for different stimuli: positive-going functions when color or motion served as the target and flankers, and delta plots with negative-going components when stimuli were arrows or orientated gratings. These results cast doubt on the proposal that negative-going delta plots occur only when spatial location serves as the interfering stimulus dimension. Moreover, because targets and flankers were always of the same stimulus type, the results also suggest that differences in materials across the relevant and irrelevant dimensions do not determine delta plot shapes. Instead, we propose that the delta plot shape is determined by several factors, including how early the interfering information is processed in the visual cortex. Keywords Conflict tasks · Inhibition · Interference · Stroop · Simon Many different tasks have come to be collectively known as conflict tasks, as they all appear to measure how the cognitive system deals with conflicting information. For example, in the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) the target information is color and the conflicting information is color word names (Fig. 1a). When the to-be-reported color matches the word name (congruent condition), responses are faster than when they mismatch (incongruent condition). In the Simon task (Simon, 1969) participants must identify the color of a stimulus that is shown on either the left or right side of the display (Fig. 1b). Responses are faster when the stimulus is shown on the same side of the display as the correct response hand, and slower when the stimulus location and response hand conflict. In both the Stroop and Simon tasks the target information is color, but in the Stroop task the conflicting information is word meaning, and in the Simon task it is spatial location. Whereas the target and interfering information in these tasks are therefore of different modalities, in other conflict tasks the target Michael S. Pratte
[email protected] 1
Mississippi State University, P.O. Box 6161, Mississippi State, MS, 39762, USA
and distracting information can be of the same type. For example, in the Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974; Eriksen, 1995) the target is a letter centered on the display, and the distractors are also letters which flank the
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