The role of temporal unpredictability for process interference and code overlap in perception-action dual tasks |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Iring?KochEmail author Barbaros?Metin Stefanie?Schuch |
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Institution: | (1) Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Amalienstrasse 33, 80799 München, Germany, |
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Abstract: | Two experiments explore interference in dual tasks. The first task required perceptual judgment of the movement direction
(left vs right) of a briefly presented stimulus; the second task was a tone-discrimination reaction-time (RT) task. Participants
reported their judgment at leisure. In 50% of the trials they were told to ignore the stimulus (no report). The directions
of stimulus movement and response in the RT task could either be the same or different, establishing cross-task compatibility
(CTC) relations. We varied the degree of temporal unpredictability by using two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA, 100 ms vs
1200 ms) for the task stimuli. In Experiment 1, SOA was varied randomly within blocks of trials in one group and between blocks
in another group. In Experiment 2, only the short SOA was used in one group and only the long SOA in another group. In both
experiments, we observed substantially longer RTs with the short compared with the long SOA, regardless of whether there was
temporal certainty (blocked or constant SOA) or uncertainty (random SOA) about stimulus onset. We assume that the process
of encoding into short-term memory in one task interferes with concurrent retrieval processes (i.e., response selection) in
the other task. This process interference effect was strongly reduced in no-report trials. Furthermore, we found shorter RT
in compatible than in incompatible trials. This CTC effect diminished with long SOA but occurred even in no-report trials,
implying that it refers to an automatically activated and then decaying code that primes response selection in the RT task. |
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