Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 158, June 2015, Pages 43-50
Acta Psychologica

Congruency effects on the basis of instructed response-effect contingencies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.04.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We report three studies with an instruction based response-effect congruency effect.

  • Instruction-based congruency effects are not restricted to instructed S–R mappings.

  • The mediating representations do not specify the relation between response and effect.

Abstract

Previous research indicated that stimulus–response congruency effects can be obtained in one task (the diagnostic task) on the basis of the instructed stimulus–response mappings of another task (the inducer task) and this without having executed the instructions of the inducer task once. A common interpretation of such finding is that instructed stimulus–response mappings are implemented into functional associations, which automatically trigger responses when being irrelevant and this without any practice. 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. In three experiments, instruction-based congruency effects were observed in the diagnostic task when the instructions of the inducer task specified response-effect contingencies. On the one hand, our results indicate that instruction-based congruency effects are not restricted to instructed S–R mappings. On the other hand, our 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.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

In Experiment 1 the goal of the inducer task was to remove a particular stimulus from a grid filled with two types of stimuli, such that both types of stimuli was presented an equal number of times. To this end, participants were instructed with R-E contingencies, relating a response to an effect stimulus.

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 for the exception that the goal of the inducer task was now to add an effect stimulus to obtain a balanced grid. The instructed R-E contingencies of the inducer task now specified that a particular key-press would make a particular effect stimulus appear on the screen (e.g., the left key produces ‘P’; the right key produces ‘Q’), rather than make it disappear. Accordingly, the sequence of events experienced in the diagnostic task did not coincide with

Experiment 3

In Experiment 3 (Fig. 3), a reinterpretation of R-E contingencies as S–R mappings was discouraged by changing the demands of the inducer task in such a way that participants would consistently consider the effect stimuli in every R-E contingency as an effect of a particular response and not as a target to which that response had to be made. In order to do so, novel R-E contingencies of the inducer task were instructed at the beginning of each run, such as “if you press left, ‘P’ appears; if you

General discussion

The present study investigated whether instruction-based congruency effects could be obtained on the basis of instructed R-E contingencies. To this end, we adapted the procedure used by Liefooghe et al., 2013, Liefooghe et al., 2012; see also (Everaert et al., 2014, Theeuwes et al., 2014) in such a way that the instructions of the inducer task now included R-E contingencies rather than S–R mappings. In three experiments, we observed an instruction-based congruency effect in the diagnostic task.

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      Ever since the seminal work of Schneider and Shiffrin (1977), physical practice is considered as the prime gateway to automaticity. In recent years, however, an increasing amount of research suggests that novel instructions specifying S-R mappings (e.g., Cohen-Kdoshay & Meiran, 2007; De Houwer et al., 2005; Liefooghe et al., 2012; Meiran et al., 2015; Wenke et al., 2007), but also instructions specifying response-effect contingencies (Theeuwes, De Houwer, Eder, & Liefooghe, 2015) and even No-Go instructions (Liefooghe, Degryse, & Theeuwes, 2016) can also lead to automatic effects. The common hypothesis is that instructions are implemented into a procedural representation, which is kept active in working memory (e.g., Liefooghe et al., 2012; Meiran, Cole, & Braver, 2012) and guides future task execution, possibly by enabling prepared reflexes (e.g., Meiran et al., 2015).

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      In addition, in 16.6% of the Go trials an uninstructed picture was presented. These Catch trials were included to avoid the strategy to implement/memorise only one of the S-R mappings during the instruction phase (see Theeuwes et al., 2015; Wenke et al., 2007, 2009). Pictures and their names were taken from the picture-naming database developed by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980).

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    This research was supported by grant BOF09/01M00209 of Ghent University to Jan De Houwer.

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