An orienting response is not enough: Bivalency not infrequency causes
the bivalency effect |
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Authors: | Alodie Rey-Mermet Beat Meier |
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Affiliation: | Institute of Psychology and Center for Cognition, Learning, andMemory, University of Bern, Switzerland |
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Abstract: | When switching tasks, occasionally responding to bivalent stimuli (i.e., stimuliwith relevant features for two different tasks) slows performance on subsequentunivalent stimuli, even when they do not share relevant features with bivalentstimuli. This performance slowing is labelled the bivalencyeffect. Here, we investigated whether the bivalency effect resultsfrom an orienting response to the infrequent stimuli (i.e., the bivalentstimuli). To this end, we compared the impact of responding to infrequentunivalent stimuli to the impact of responding to infrequent bivalent stimuli.For the latter, the results showed a performance slowing for all trialsfollowing bivalent stimuli. This indicates a long-lasting bivalency effect,replicating previous findings. For infrequent univalent stimuli, however, theresults showed a smaller and shorter-lived performance slowing. These resultsdemonstrate that the bivalency effect does not simply reflect an orientingresponse to infrequent stimuli. Rather it results from the conflict induced bybivalent stimuli, probably by episodic binding with the more demanding contextcreated by them. |
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Keywords: | bivalent stimuli task switching cognitive control episodic context binding |
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