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Effects of multiple reference points in spatial stimulus-response compatibility.

In two experiments, spatial stimulus-response compatibility effects in situations where the stimulus could appear in eight different locations were investigated. The locations were obtained as a result of orthogonal manipulation of hemispace, visual hemifield within hemispace, and relative position within hemifield. In the first experiment, only relative position within hemifield was relevant for selecting one of two responses (left or right). The results showed that both hemifield and relative position formed the basis of compatibility effects. In the second experiment, which was in most respects identical to the first, all spatial information was irrelevant. Only the geometrical shape of the stimulus determined the correct response. The results showed three S-R compatibility effects, based on hemispace, hemifield, and relative position. These results contradict earlier findings, and have implications for models of stimulus-response compatibility.

Adult↗

Stimulus-response compatibility and the Simon effect: toward a conceptual clarification.

The current view that the Simon effect (Simon & Small, 1969) reflects stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) is questioned. Previous accounts of the Simon effect have overlooked stimulus congruity (SC), the correspondence relation borne by the two simultaneous aspects of the stimulus, a factor inevitably confounded in the Simon paradigm with irrelevant spatial S-R correspondence. The Hedge and Marsh (1975) reversal effect, replicated in Experiment 1, is reinterpreted as decisive evidence that the Simon effect is entirely accounted for by SC. Furthermore, in Experiment 2 irrelevant S-R correspondence was manipulated in the absence of any variation of SC, and the Simon effect vanished. It is concluded that the Simon effect, contrary to current opinion, represents a spatial variant of the Stroop effect and is irrelevant to the SRC issue. The view that mental operations proceed automatically at the stage of response determination loses one of its strongest empirical arguments.

Adult↗

Dimensional overlap: cognitive basis for stimulus-response compatibility--a model and taxonomy.

The classic problem of stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility (SRC) is addressed. A cognitive model is proposed that views the stimulus and response sets in S-R ensembles as categories with dimensions that may or may not overlap. If they do overlap, the task may be compatible or incompatible, depending on the assigned S-R mapping. If they do not overlap, the task is noncompatible regardless of the assigned mapping. The overlapping dimensions may be relevant or not. The model provides a systematic account of SRC effects, a taxonomy of simple performance tasks that were hitherto thought to be unrelated, and suggestive parallels between these tasks and the experimental paradigms that have traditionally been used to study attentional, controlled, and automatic processes.

Arousal↗

Persistence of stimulus-response compatibility effects with extended practice.

The influence of extended practice on stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility effects was investigated. Three experiments, each extending over a period of 8 sessions, were conducted. The nature and degree of compatibility was manipulated across experiments. In all experiments, a persistent effect of S-R compatibility on reaction times was observed. Thus, the lower bound for reaction times appears to be less for compatible assignments than for incompatible assignments. This persistence of S-R compatibility indicates that the initial codings used to perform a novel task continue to exert an influence on later performance.

Adult↗

Attentional focussing and spatial stimulus-response compatibility.

The relative functional significance of attention shifts and attentional zooming for the coding of stimulus position in spatial compatibility tasks is demonstrated by proposing and testing experimentally a tentative explanation of the absence of a Simon effect in Experiment 3 of Umiltà and Liotti (1987). It is assumed that the neutral point of the spatial frame of reference for coding spatial position is at the position where attention is focussed immediately before exposition of the stimulus pattern. If a stimulus pattern is exposed to the right or the left of this position a spatial compatibility effect can be observed when the stimulus-response pairing is incompatible. Generalizing from this, one can say that a spatial compatibility effect will be observed if the last step in attentional focussing of the stimulus attribute specifying the response is a horizontal or a vertical attention shift. If the last step in focussing is attentional zooming (change in the representational level attended to), the stimulus pattern is localized at the horizontal and the vertical positions where the last attention shift had positioned the focus. In this case the spatial code is neutral on these dimensions and so no spatial compatibility effect should result. To test this model we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 replicated the finding of Umiltà and Liotti that there is no Simon effect in the condition with no delay between a positional cue (two small boxes on the left or right of a fixation cross) and the imperative stimulus, whereas in the condition with a delay of 500 ms a Simon effect was observed.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adult↗

Stimulus-response compatibilities between vertically oriented stimuli and horizontally oriented responses: the effects of hand position and posture.

Stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility effects between vertically oriented stimuli (above or below fixation) and horizontally oriented responses (left or right switch deflections by a single hand) have been shown to depend both on which hand responds (Bauer & Miller, 1982) and on the location at which the response is made (eccentricity on a frontoparallel line; Michaels, 1989). In the latter study, hand position and hand posture were confounded, so it is unclear which variable determined the compatibility effect. In Experiment 1, the importance of effector position was tested. Vertically oriented stimuli were paired with a horizontal response solicited at different locations but always involving the same hand posture. Compatibility effects emerged, and their direction depended on position. In Experiment 2, the compatibilities were not evident in a simple reaction time paradigm, so the effect was not due to differential ease of responses. In Experiment 3, a change in hand posture (palm up or palm down) at the same location (the body midline) also affected the compatibilities. It was concluded that the S-R compatibility of orthogonally oriented stimuli and responses is influenced by (1) which hand responds, (2) the location of that hand, and (3) its posture. The results imply that both postural and positional states of the action system affect S-R compatibility.

Fixation, Ocular↗

Influence of spatial stimulus-response compatibility on reaction time of ipsilateral and contralateral hand to lateralized light stimuli.

In a simple reaction time task, key-pressing responses to unpatterned light stimuli presented in the right and left visual fields were faster for the hand ipsilateral to the visual stimulus than for the hand contralateral to the stimulus. The superiority of the ipsilateral reactions was seen also when responses were made with the hands crossed, so that such a superiority cannot be attributed to spatial compatibility between the side of the stimulus and the position of the response device. Similar results were obtained in a reaction time task of the Donders's c-type. It is argued that these laterality effects in visuomotor reaction time tasks are best explained by the anatomical relationships between the visual fields, the cerebral hemispheres, and the hands. The possible interaction between these effects and the effects of spatial compatibility between side of stimulus and side of response device are discussed in relation to reaction time tasks of the Donder's b-type.

Adult↗

Spatial representations of words and nonwords.

The first two experiments investigated whether the representations of words, besides being unitary, are also spatial in nature. Subjects were required to search for target letters in either five-letter words or five-letter nonwords. They were instructed to press the right-side key for one target and the left-side key for the other target. The center item of the letter string was always at fixation. Targets appeared one at a time, located at the second (left side) or the fourth (right side) position within the letter string. The results showed that: a) responses to targets within words were faster than responses to targets within nonwords (the word-superiority effect); b) responses to compatible stimulus-response pairings were faster than responses to incompatible stimulus-response pairings (the spatial compatibility, or, more precisely, the Simon effect); and c) in Experiment 2, left-side targets were responded to faster than right-side targets within nonwords (the left-right scanning effect). It was concluded that representations of both words and nonwords are spatial in nature. Experiment 3 was aimed at testing whether the spatial layout of the representations of words is always along the left-right horizontal dimension, regardless of the topographic transformation of the stimulus. The same words and nonwords used in the previous experiments were shown vertically and the subjects were required to make left-right discriminative responses to upper and lower target letters. The results showed the word-superiority effect but no spatial compatibility effects. It was concluded that the representation of a vertically presented word is vertically arranged.

Adult↗

Effects of severe closed-head injury on three stages of information processing.

The present study investigated the loci of the information-processing delay that characteristically follows severe closed-head injury (CHI). Sternberg's additive-factors logic was used to determine the effects of severe CHI on the central information-processing stages of stimulus encoding, memory comparison, and decision-making/response-selection. The task variables used to define the stages operationally were stimulus quality, memory set size, and stimulus-response compatibility. Twenty subjects who had sustained a severe CHI more than 18 months earlier and 20 matched control subjects completed a stimulus encoding by response selection task in Experiment 1, and a Sternberg high-speed memory scanning task in Experiment 2. The CHI group performed the stimulus encoding and decision-making/response-selection stages of processing significantly slower than did the control group. However, no significant group differences were found on the memory comparison stage, suggesting that memory comparison processes may be relatively intact in long-term patients with severe head trauma. The results are discussed in relation to a global and a late-specificity hypothesis of central processing deficits following severe CHI. The possibility that cognitive processes demanding less attention may be more resilient to injury is also considered.

Adult↗

Influence of anatomical factors and spatial compatibility on the stimulus-response relationship in the absence of the corpus callosum.

Simple and choice reaction times (RTs) to lateralized flashes of light were measured in two acallosal subjects, a callosotomized patient with sparing of the splenium, six IQ-matched controls and six controls with above average IQ. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of stimulus-response factors on visuomotor integration in the absence of the corpus callosum. The results showed that simple-RTs are faster for all groups when sensory input and motor output are coordinated in the same hemisphere, regardless of the spatial relationship between stimulus (S) and response (R). The difference between ipsilateral and contralateral RTs, taken as a measure of interhemispheric transmission time (ITT), was more than three times longer in the patients lacking the corpus callosum than in the controls. In the choice-RT paradigm, the main determinant of the response speed was S-R spatial compatibility rather than the anatomical relationship between the neural structures receiving the visual input and those controlling the motor output. Spatially compatible S-R pairings were always faster than incompatible pairings. The compatibility effect was present in all subjects but it was significantly larger in the callosum-deprived patients and their IQ-matched controls with respect to the high-IQ controls. The latter finding suggests that cognitive factors may be involved in the production of the spatial compatibility effect.

Adult↗

Serial reaction time as a function of the nature of repeated events.

Past research into the phenomenon of reduced latency to repeated events in serial reaction time tasks resulted in attempts to partition reaction time into components attributable to separate cognitive processes. These attempts focused on many-to-one condensing paradigms, which permitted direct assessment of the effect of response-only repetitions but not stimulus-only repetitions. The three experiments reported in the present study used a technique designed to overcome this limitation. It was found that repetition of only the symbolic content of the total stimulus-response event was a sufficient condition for a reduced response latency and that response-only repetitions tended to be facilitative only when stimulus-response relations were compatible. These and related findings were discussed with respect to their bearing on contemporary issues concerning the analysis of cognitive operations into separable and additive components.

Discrimination, Psychological↗

Effects of S-R mapping and response modality on performance in a Stroop Task.

Forty subjects performed a choice reaction time task in which the stimulus was the word Red or Green printed in either red or green ink. Subjects responded verbally in one block of trials and by key pressing in another block. For one group, ink color was the relevant cue, and for another group, the word was the relevant cue. Half of the subjects in each group were instructed to make the response that corresponded to the relevant cue (compatible S-R [stimulus-response] mapping); the other half were instructed to make the response that did not correspond (incompatible S-R mapping). In general, subjects who performed under compatible S-R mapping instructions reacted faster when the irrelevant cue corresponded to the response than when it did not. In contrast, subjects show performed under incompatible S-R mapping instructions reacted faster when there was a lack of correspondence between the irrelevant cue and the response than when there was correspondence. Results were consistent with a notion of logical recoding; that is, that instructing subjects to recode the relevant cue into the alternate color may have caused them to recode the irrelevant cue in the same logical manner. Results might also be interpreted to suggest that the Stroop effect is related to congruence between the relevant and the irrelevant cues rather than to correspondence between the irrelevant cue and the response.

Color Perception↗

Androgyne becomes bisexual in sexological theory: Plato to Freud and neuroscience.

Plato conceptualized primordial humans as androgynes, the children of the moon. The primordial hermaphroditism of the mammalian embryo became known 2 1/2 millennia later in the mid-19th century. By 1864 Ulrichs had transposed the new knowledge from embryology to sexology to explain those to whom he gave the name Urnings (after Uranus who gave womanless birth to Venus from sea spume) as having "a woman's mind trapped in a man's body" (anima muliebris corpore virili inclusa). Urning became displaced by sexual inversion, and eventually by homosexual, a term coined together with heterosexual by Kertbeny as recently as 1869. The embryological principle of primordial hermaphroditism became linked to evolutionary Darwinism by way of Haeckel's principle of recapitulation, epitomized as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The recapitulation principle became linked, in turn, to the principle of intrapsychic primordial bisexuality, which became a cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Genetics influences the outcome of bipotentiality not directly but by way of hormonal programming of the brain, prenatally or neonatally, rather than pubertally and in maturity. Bipotentiality within the brain has been investigated chiefly in the hypothalamus where male/female dimorphism has been recognized, but its determinants and stages of differentiation, both prenatal and postnatal, remain to be fully ascertained. Neuroanatomical research on the outcome of male/female bipotentiality as gay, straight, or in between is politically and morally opposed by those who postulate a bipotential preference or voluntary choice. In stimulus-response associationism, to which behavior-modification theory belongs, bisexuality is equipotential, and either alternative may be evoked, ostensibly, dependent on the stimulus situation. In ethological theory, the effectiveness of stimulus-response bonding is confined chronologically to a critical period of development and is restricted phylogenetically by an innate recognition mechanism and an innate releasing mechanism. These limits are compatible, however, with some degree of both individual and ethnic variation.

Bisexuality↗

Evaluation of compatibility effects in the precuing of arm and direction parameters.

The present study evaluated the role of compatibility effects in the precuing of arm and direction parameters. In the first two experiments different stimulus and response arrangements were examined. For all three experiments the spatial precue and imperative stimuli were compatibly assigned to responses (i.e., a direct correspondence existed between the stimulus and response locations). Experiments 1 and 2 indirectly tested the effect of decision processes required by the stimulus-response set. Experiment 1 replicated previous research that has found longer reaction times for the direction uncertain parameter as compared to arm uncertain. Experiment 2 examined the precuing of arm and direction parameters with stimuli that maintained right-left arrangements for both parameters. Unlike Experiment 1, reaction times did not differ for precuing the two movement parameters. Experiment 3 directly examined the effect of differential decision requirements from up-down spatial stimuli and right-left spatial stimuli for a single parameter. In support of results from the first two experiments, results indicated longer reaction times for decisions from up-down stimuli as compared to right-left stimuli. Because reaction times for precued movement parameters are a function of the stimulus and response arrangements used, differences in reaction times are most likely due to compatibility effects arising from differences in the spatial arrangements of the precued stimulus and response set.

Arm↗

The effects of lower body negative pressure on baroreceptor responses in humans.

In healthy human subjects the immediate responses of pulse interval and the steady-state responses of arterial blood pressure and cardiac output to changes in carotid sinus transmural pressure were determined before and during the application of a subatmospheric pressure to the lower part of the body. Increases in carotid sinus transmural pressure, effected by applications of subatmospheric pressure to the neck (neck suction) resulted in prolongation of pulse interval and decrease in blood pressure; opposite responses were obtained to application of a positive pressure (neck pressure). Application of lower body negative pressure resulted in a decrease in pulse interval (heart rate increase) but little change in blood pressure. During lower body negative pressure, the responses of pulse interval to neck pressure were reduced but those to neck suction were unaffected; the responses of blood pressure to neck suction were enhanced but those to neck pressure were unaffected. From experiments in which cardiac output was also determined, it was seen that lower body negative pressure reduced cardiac output, increased calculated total body vascular resistance and augmented the resistance response to neck suction although not to neck pressure. These results are compatible with the view that application of lower body negative pressure does not change the sensitivity of the baroreceptor reflex and that the changes in the responses are due to non-linearities of the stimulus-response curves.

Adult↗

Coding of information about tactile stimuli by neurones of the cuneate nucleus.

1. The responses of cuneate neurones to controlled tactile stimulation of the foot pads were examined in unanaesthetized, decerebrate cats. The neurones were divided into three functional classes; one sensitive to steady tactile stimuli, and two dynamically sensitive classes which could be readily differentiated by their responsiveness to cutaneous vibration. Each class appeared to receive an exclusive input from only one of the three known groups of tactile receptors associated with the foot pads, namely the Pacinian corpuscles, the Merkel endings and the intradermal, encapsulated endings known as Krause or Meissner corpuscles. 2. Cuneate neurones responsive to steady indentation of the skin displayed approximately linear or sigmoidal stimulus-response relations over indentation ranges up to approximately 1.5--2 mm. Response variability at a fixed stimulus intensity was relatively low and showed little systematic change over the full range of the stimulus-response curves. 3. One class of dynamically sensitive cuneate neurones responded to cutaneous vibration over a range of approximately 5-80 Hz with maximal responsiveness around 30 Hz. The other class, the Pacinian neurones, responded over a range of approximately 80- greater than 600 Hz with maximal responsiveness at 200-400 Hz. The thresholds and combined band width of vibratory sensitivity of these populations were comparable with known subjective thresholds and range of cutaneous vibratory sensibility. 4. Responses of cuneate neurones were phase-locked to the vibratory stimulus suggesting that information about vibration frequency could be coded by the patterns of impulse activity. Quantitative measures indicated that maximal phase-locking occurred in responses to vibration frequencies of 10-50 Hz with a progressive decline at higher frequencies. Above 400 Hz, impulse activity occurred almost randomly throughout the vibratory stimulus cycle and therefore carried little further signal of vibratory frequency. The decline, with increasing frequency, in the ability of cuneate neurones to signal information about vibratory frequency parallels the known subjective capacities for frequency discrimination. 5. A switch-over occurred at approximately 80 Hz in the population of cuneate neurones able to provide the more reliable signal of vibratory frequency; above 80 Hz, the Pacinian neurones; below 80 Hz, the neurones receiving intradermal, rapidly adapting receptor input from the pads. 6. The observed properties of cuneate neurones are compatible with a role in signalling information which could contribute to subjective tactile abilities.

Action Potentials↗