Effects of an irrelevant auditory stimulus on visual choice reaction time.
About: This article is published in Journal of Experimental Psychology.The article was published on 1970-11-01. It has received 135 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Second-order stimulus & Two-alternative forced choice.
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TL;DR: In this paper, three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter discrimination task, and found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face.
Abstract: This paper seeks to bring together two previously separate research traditions: research on spatial orienting within the visual cueing paradigm and research into social cognition, addressing our tendency to attend in the direction that another person looks. Cueing methodologies from mainstream attention research were adapted to test the automaticity of orienting in the direction of seen gaze. Three studies manipulated the direction of gaze in a computerized face, which appeared centrally in a frontal view during a peripheral letter-discrimination task. Experiments 1 and 2 found faster discrimination of peripheral target letters on the side the computerized face gazed towards, even though the seen gaze did not predict target side, and despite participants being asked to ignore the face. This suggests reflexive covert and/or overt orienting in the direction of seen gaze, arising even when the observer has no motivation to orient in this way. Experiment 3 found faster letter discrimination on the side the computerized face gazed towards even when participants knew that target letters were four times as likely on the opposite side. This suggests that orienting can arise in the direction of seen gaze even when counter to intentions. The experiments illustrate that methods from mainstream attention research can be usefully applied to social cognition, and that studies of spatial attention may profit from considering its social function.
1,010 citations
Cites methods from "Effects of an irrelevant auditory s..."
...This was used in an effort to reduce the variance that might be produced by any Simon effect ( Simon & Craft, 1970 ) that could have arisen if a left response had ever been required for a target letter appearing on the right, or vice versa....
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...This was used in an effort to reduce the variance that might be produced by any Simon effect (Simon & Craft, 1970) that could have arisen if a left response had ever been required for a target letter appearing on the right, or vice versa....
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TL;DR: This chapter discusses the effects of an irrelevant directional cue on human information processing and the Simon effect with visual displays, which finds that movements to the right are faster when the right command is heard in the right ear than when it is seen in the left ear.
Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the effects of an irrelevant directional cue on human information processing. A fundamental concern in cognitive psychology and in human factors engineering is to understand the factors that affect the speed of translating information from a display into an appropriate control action. A series of related experiments demonstrate that the location of a stimulus provides an irrelevant directional cue that affects the time required to process the meaning of the stimulus. The reaction time data have revealed that the effect was not because of any simple isomorphic association between ear stimulated and ipsilateral hand. The same command ear stimulated interaction has also occurred for movement time. It is found that movements to the right are faster when the right command is heard in the right ear than when it is heard in the left ear, and, similarly, movements to the left are faster when the left command is heard in the left ear than when it is heard in the right ear. The Simon effect with visual displays is also elaborated in the chapter.
729 citations
01 Jan 1990
TL;DR: This chapter is concerned with some of the issues involved in understanding how perception contributes to the control of actions, as well as the environmental consequences that go along with these bodily events.
Abstract: This chapter is concerned with some of the issues involved in understanding how perception contributes to the control of actions. Roughly speaking, the term of action refers to any meaningful segment of an organisms intercourse with its environment. Two important features of this preliminary definition can be brought out more clearly when “actions” are contrasted with “responses” and “movements”. Unlike response-centered approaches to psychology, which consider the organisms activity more or less determined by the actual stimulus information, the action approach emphasizes intentional control as being simultaneous with (or even prior to) informational control of activity, assuming that intentional processes fix the rules for the selection and use of stimulus information (Heuer Prinz, 1987; Neumann Prinz, 1987). Unlike movement-centered approaches, which describe the organisms activity in terms of the dynamics of muscular contraction patterns and the kinematics of the resulting body movements, the action approach stresses the environmental consequences that go along with these bodily events, contending that meaningful interactions with the environment, rather than movements per se, should be considered the effective functional units of activity (Fowler Turvey, 1982; Neisser, 1985).
701 citations
TL;DR: Psychological results that support the notion that two components are better received than one alone are presented, and it is shown that multicomponency does indeed improve signal reception in receivers, although the benefits of producing components in two sensory modalities may be larger and more robust than producing them in just one.
668 citations
Cites background from "Effects of an irrelevant auditory s..."
...Thus the reaction time of humans to a visual stimulus is faster when it is accompanied by an accessory acoustic stimulus than when presented alone (Simon & Craft 1970)....
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TL;DR: The authors showed that bilingual children perform the Simon task more rapidly than monolingual children, but only on conditions in which the demands for inhibitory control were high, and showed no advantage on tasks that required inhibition of response.
Abstract: Previous research has shown that bilingual children excel in tasks requiring inhibitory control to ignore a misleading perceptual cue. The present series of studies extends this finding by identifying the degree and type of inhibitory control for which bilingual children demonstrate this advantage. Study 1 replicated the earlier research by showing that bilingual children perform the Simon task more rapidly than monolinguals, but only on conditions in which the demands for inhibitory control were high. The next two studies compared performance on tasks that required inhibition of attention to a specific cue, like the Simon task, and inhibition of a habitual response, like the day–night Stroop task. In both studies, bilingual children maintained their advantage on tasks that require control of attention but showed no advantage on tasks that required inhibition of response. These results confine the bilingual advantage found previously to complex tasks requiring control over attention to competing cues (interference suppression) and not to tasks requiring control over competing responses (response inhibition).
568 citations
Cites background from "Effects of an irrelevant auditory s..."
...The Simon effect is the result of interference between the stimulus’ spatial code and the spatial code of the associated response (Simon and Craft, 1970)....
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References
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01 Jan 1975Abstract: It was a misfortune of psychology that it lacked a tradition of dealing with rigorous mathematical theories when psychologists were first attracted by information theory. Applications were made with simple-minded identification of psychological concepts with communication terms, without really paying attention to the meaning of the terms in the respective areas. Quite a few experiments were reported measuring human channel capacity under various experimental conditions without asking the basic question: Does the human being comply with the definition of channel in communication engineering? It is true that, in spite of this carelessness, the bulk of experiments re~ ported demonstrated some systematic results as summarized by G. A. Miller in his concept of The Magical Number Seven. However, these experiments also led to various riddles and confusions as illustrated by Garner in Chapter 2 of this book. And this is undoubtedly the reason that many frustrated psychologists finally gave up information theory as useless to psychology. Still, after the waxing and waning of information theory in psychology, an important recognition remained: Information processing is one of the most significant functions of man. The recognition must eventually revive the application of information theory to psychology as a sheer necessity. Probably " application" is not a proper word. A kind of information theory must be developed which is suitable to describe as complicated aa information processing mechanism as man. A first step toward such a theory was taken by McGill in his paper published in Psychometrika in 1954. What I call a misfortune of psychology is this: Instead of taking McGill's mathematical system (called symmetric uncerlainty analysis by Garner and abbreviated here as SUA) as a conceptual tool iu analyzing psychological problems, the tradition of psychology almost forced us to see it as another statistical testing technique analogous to the analysis of variance. As such, SUA was not so handy as the analysis of variance because of the lack of known distributions, and thus SUA failed to acquire popularity. What we needed then, and need now, is a conceptual means which logically bridges information theory to psychology. So the author could not do better in entirely leaving out of the book the significance testing aspect of SUA. I t must be pointed out that SUA is not a model of human behavior. I t is a system of mathematics (or, I would rather say, of logics) so that it is infallible as far as it goes. This aspect of SUA must be clearly remembered. Information theory, developed in communication engineering, is a normative theory. It is
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