S-R compatibility and changes in RT with practice

A visual, two-choice RT experiment was performed to assess the effect of practice on compatibility effects. The data are interpreted as showing that identification of the position of the hand gradually becomes independent of the hand's normal side.Further analysis suggests that “compatible” or “natural” relationships are those in which a single recoding process can be successfully applied to all the relevant spatial relationships. This gives rise to the further prediction that where all relationships are uniformly “incompatible”, performance will be better than where there is a mixture of “compatible” and “incompatible” relationships.