No evidence for automatic response activation with target onset in the avatar-compatibility task
- PDF / 972,337 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 173 Views
No evidence for automatic response activation with target onset in the avatar-compatibility task C. Böffel 1 & J. Müsseler 1 Published online: 11 June 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract When people take the perspective of an avatar and perform a stimulus-response compatibility task, they generally show the same compatibility effects that are expected from the avatar’s position instead of their own. In this study, we investigated if these effects are caused by automatic response activation, a concept featured in dual-route models of stimulus-response compatibility. In two experiments we asked 24 participants each to perform a compatibility task from an avatar’s point of view. We introduced a delay between the presentation of the target and the avatar in half of the trials so that the participants had to wait until the avatar appeared to select the correct response. Because the automatic response activation is known to decay quickly, its influence is eliminated in this condition. In contrast to the prediction by the automatic response activation account, we observed a larger compatibility effect in the delayed condition with orthogonal (Experiment 1) and parallel (Experiment 2) stimulus-response pairings. Additionally, distributional analyses of the compatibility effects did not support the automaticity predictions. We conclude that these results call into question the role of automatic response activation for spatial compatibility in general and perspective-based compatibility effects in particular. Keywords Avatars . Stimulus response compatibility . Automaticity . Visual perspective taking . Spatial cognition
Introduction Past studies have shown that responses are generally faster for same versus other side reactions when participants have to perform key presses either on the same side (ipsilateral) or on the opposite side (contralateral) of a visual stimulus (e.g., Brebner et al. 1972; Proctor, Yamaguchi, Dutt, & Gonzalez, 2013). An ipsilateral condition would, for example, demand a left key press as an answer to a disc presented on the left side of the screen, while a contralateral condition would require a right response to the same stimulus. Such tasks demonstrating that certain mappings of stimuli to responses lead to faster response times and fewer errors than others are known as (stimulus-response) compatibility tasks and the observed Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01052-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * C. Böffel [email protected] 1
Work and Cognitive Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
performance differences as compatibility effects (for an overview, see Proctor & Vu, 2006). Such a compatibility effect is also present when the ipsi-/ contralateral decision is based on a different perspective. Müsseler, Ruhland, and Böffel (2019) asked participants to solve a compatibility task from an avatar’s point of view. Depending on the color of a stimulus, their response
Data Loading...
