Congruency effects on the basis of instructed response-effect contingencies

TL;DR: The results indicate that instruction-based congruency effects are not restricted to instructed S-R mappings and suggest that the representations that mediate these effects do not specify the nature of the relation between response and effect even though this relation was explicitly specified by the instructions.

About: This article is published in Acta Psychologica.The article was published on 2015-06-01 and is currently open access. It has received 13 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Task (project management).

Summary

Introduction

• Previous research indicated that stimulus-response congruency effects can be obtained in one task (the diagnostic task) on the basis of the instructed stimulus-response mappings of another task (the inducer task) and this without having executed the instructions of the inducer task once.
• The present study offers a more stringent test of the question whether instruction-based congruency effects can be obtained on the basis of instructed R-E contingencies.
• On congruent diagnostic trials, the stimulus and the correct response were part of the same R-E contingency in the inducer task.

Materials

• Experiment 1 consisted of different runs each containing two tasks : the inducer task and the diagnostic task.
• This ‘grid’ contained the two effect stimuli instructed at the beginning of that run.
• In the diagnostic task participants judged whether a stimulus was printed upright or in italic by pressing the left or right key.
• Each block consisted of two runs of each run-length.
• Half of the trials in the diagnostic task required a response that was in line with the R-E contingencies of the inducer task (i.e., congruent trials).

Procedure

• Participants were tested individually by means of personal computers with a 17-inch color monitor running Tscope (Stevens, Lammertyn, Verbruggen, & Vandierendonck, 2006).
• Instructions were presented on the screen and paraphrased by the experimenter if necessary.
• These contingencies remained on screen until the participant pressed the spacebar or a maximum time of 20 seconds elapsed.
• The first trial of the diagnostic task started 750 ms after the removal of the R-E contingencies.
• When participants pressed one of the two keys, the corresponding effect stimulus was removed from the grid.

Results

• The data of three participants who made more than 58% of errors in the inducer task were excluded from further analysis.
• For the RT analysis, the same exclusion criteria were used as in the previous experiments (data loss errors: 8.6% of all trials; data loss RTs longer than 2.5 SDs from a participant’s mean cell RT: 2.7% of the total amount of correct trials).
• The RTs were measured from the onset of the Yes/No screen.

Discussion

• In Experiment 3, the inducer task was adapted in such a way that reinterpreting the instructed R-E contingencies as S-R mappings was completely redundant in order to perform the inducer task.
• An instruction-based congruency effect was observed in the diagnostic task, corroborating the results of the previous experiments.
• Both in terms of response speed and accuracy, performance was superior on congruent diagnostic trials compared to incongruent diagnostic trials.
• This result confirms the conclusion that instruction-based congruency effects can be obtained on the basis of instructed and actively prepared R-E contingencies.

Method

• Twenty-six right-handed students at Ghent University participated for payment of 5 Euros.
• The inducer task was changed in several ways.
• When both the left/right response to the target word and the yes/no response were correct, participants received one point.
• On the top of the screen the point earned or lost during that run was displayed.
• The number of runs and trials during these blocks were identical to Experiment 1 and 2.

General Discussion

• The present study investigated whether instruction-based congruency effects could be obtained on the basis of instructed R-E contingencies.
• The present findings thus indicate that instruction-based congruency effects can be possibly observed on the basis of different types of instructions.
• An important difference between the present study and previous research on R-E contingencies is that the R-E contingencies of the inducer task are explicitly instructed.

Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31, 1067–1082.

• Action control according to TEC (theory of event coding).
• In: Relationships between perception and action: Current approaches, ed. O. Neumann & W. Prinz.
• The task rule congruency effect in task switching reflects activated long term memory.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The present study investigated whether instruction-based congruency effects are also observed for a different type of instructions than instructed S-R mappings, namely instructed response-effect contingencies. The present study aims to make a first step in this direction by investigating to which extent instruction-based congruency effects can be obtained on the basis of instructions specifying the contingency between a particular response and the effect it elicits in the environment ( i. e. Response-Effect or R-E contingencies ). Of interest for the present purpose is a study of Hommel, Alfonso, and Fuentes ( 2003 ), which observed that action effects can generalize over words sharing semantic features. The present study offers a more stringent test of the question whether instruction-based congruency effects can be obtained on the basis of instructed R-E contingencies. On the other hand, their results suggest that the representations that mediate these effects do not specify the nature of the relation between response and effect even though this relation was explicitly specified by the instructions. Liefooghe et al. ( 2012, see also Meiran et al., 2012 ; Wenke et al., 2007 ) suggested that instructionbased congruency effects indicate that instructed S-R mappings are transformed into procedural associations during task preparation, which automatically trigger response activations when being irrelevant ( see, Everaert et al. This finding suggests that a congruency effect based on R-E contingencies can be obtained with stimuli that never co-occurred with a particular response in the acquisition phase, but that resemble stimuli that were part of a previously learned R-E contingency. Based on the proposal of Hommel ( 2009 ), the observation of an instructionInstruction-Based Response-Effect Congruency 7 based congruency effect on the basis of instructed R-E contingencies may suggest that while the associations formed on the basis of instructions do include stimulus and response codes, they do not include a qualification of the particular relation between these codes ( i. e., a particular effect is contingent upon a particular response ), even though such relation is explicitly specified by the instructions. 

Q2. What are the future works in this paper?

It becomes clear that future research on instruction implementation, will also need to focus on the communalities and differences between the types of instructions that are implemented. Further evidence for the role of mode-independent short-term associations in spatial Simon effects.