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.