Response-compatibility effects in children

Abstract

The Eriksen Flanker task is a classic paradigm for investigating interference at the level of response compatibility. Several previous studies analyzed the ability of young children (starting at the age of four years) to ignore flanking distractors in children-specific variants of the task. However, in all published studies the interference took place at the perceptual level as well as on the level of response compatibility because the ‘compatible condition’ involved stimulus congruency as well as response compatibility. By confounding stimulus congruency and response compatibility, interference at the level of response programming and priming at the perceptual level cannot be distinguished: the observed flanker effects might not be the result of successfully ignoring but instead might just be explained due to priming. We tested 57 children aged between 7 and 12 years in a flanker variant in which all trials were perceptually incongruent but different at the level of response compatibility (compatible versus incompatible). Children showed a flanker effect (faster reaction times in response compatible trials) that was, however, in terms of the effect size, smaller than flanker effects reported in previous studies.

Keywords::

• Flanker effect
• Response compatibility
• Interference control