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).
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.