Visual selection and response selection without effector selection in tasks with circular arrays
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Visual selection and response selection without effector selection in tasks with circular arrays Robert W. Proctor 1
&
Alice F. Healy 2,3
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Charles Eriksen and colleagues conducted influential visual-search experiments with circular arrays for which the responses were either vocal naming or unimanual left–right switch movements. These methods have the advantages of the stimuli being equidistant from a centered fixation point and allowing study of visual selection and response selection when effector selection is not required, as in the more typical case in which responses are key presses of distinct fingers. Other researchers have used similar spatial arrangements, but with aimed movements of the limb or of a mouse-controlled cursor to study effects of stimulus identification, visual search, spatial stimulus–response compatibility, response–effect compatibility, and practice/transfer in isolation and jointly. We systematically review studies in these areas that include visual selection and response selection and execution, and examine implications of their results for the role of effector selection. Also, we illustrate that as one moves from simpler to more complex tasks, the results are consistent with a basic information-processing framework in which stimulus identification and selection of a target response location are distinct from selecting, planning, and moving an effector to the targeted location. Keywords Attention: Selective . Goal-directed movements . Perception and Action . Response-effect compatibility . Spatial information processing . Stimulus-response compatibility . Visual search
Prelude When we think of Charles W. Eriksen’s research on spatiotemporal characteristics of visual attention and information processing, incisive, logically, and empirically precise studies come to mind. He was meticulous in his investigations of such topics as visual search, spatial cuing, and correspondence effects of flanking stimuli on an attended target (e.g., C. W. Eriksen & Hoffman, 1973). His research used multiple converging operations, as advocated in the classic article by Garner, Hake, and Eriksen (1956), to isolate, identify, and
* Robert W. Proctor [email protected] 1
Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, 703 Third St., West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
2
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, USA
3
Present address: 1901 Walnut Street, Apt 16A, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA
confirm the processes underlying performance of visual information-processing tasks. Much of Eriksen’s research used circular arrays to study visual attention and unimanual responses that did not require effector selection. These methods and their extensions allow investigation of a range of spatial factors in human information processing without complication from nonspatial factors such as differences in retinal sensitivity and selection of a response effector, as occurs when stimuli are various distances from
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