Too much information … The influence of target selection difficulty on binding processes

ABSTRACT

The binding of stimuli and responses is an important mechanism in action control. Features of stimuli and responses are integrated into event files. A re-encounter with one or more of the stored features leads to automatic retrieval of the previous event file including the previously integrated response. The distractor-response binding effect evidenced that even irrelevant stimuli can be integrated with a response, subsequently trigger retrieval and thereby have an impact on behaviour. However, the type of distractor stimuli, the method of distractor presentation, and the display configuration largely differed in previous studies with regard to the target selection difficulty. In the present study, we thus varied the extent of target selection difficulty to investigate its role on the distractor-response binding effect. The results indicated that both processes, distractor-response binding and distractor-response retrieval are dependent on target selection difficulty. These results are discussed against recent theorizing in the BRAC framework (Frings, C., Hommel, B., Koch, I., Rothermund, K., Dignath, D., Giesen, C., Kiesel, A., Kunde, W., Mayr, S., Moeller, B., Möller, M., Pfister, R., & Philipp, A. (2020). Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(5), 375–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.02.004).

KEYWORDS:

• Action control
• S-R binding
• attention
• target selection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Ruth Laub: conceptualization, validation, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, visualization, project administration.

Alexander Münchau: writing – review & editing.

Christian Beste: writing – review & editing.

Christian Frings: conceptualization, methodology, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, supervision, funding.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the institutional ethical standards and in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Open practices statement

The data of all experiments will be publicly available at PsychArchives, a service by the Leibniz Institute of Psychology Information (ZPID), once the manuscript has been accepted for publication. None of the experiments was preregistered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft FOR 2790 and FOR 2698.