Response-specifying cue for action interferes with perception of feature-sharing stimuli

Abstract

Perceiving a visual stimulus is more difficult when a to-be-executed action is compatible with that stimulus, which is known as blindness to response-compatible stimuli. The present study explored how the factors constituting the action event (i.e., response-specifying cue, response intention, and response feature) affect the occurrence of this blindness effect. The response-specifying cue varied along the horizontal and vertical dimensions, while the response buttons were arranged diagonally. Participants responded based on one dimension randomly determined in a trial-by-trial manner. The response intention varied along a single dimension, whereas the response location and the response-specifying cue varied within both vertical and horizontal dimensions simultaneously. Moreover, the compatibility between the visual stimulus and the response location and the compatibility between that stimulus and the response-specifying cue was separately determined. The blindness effect emerged exclusively based on the feature correspondence between the response-specifying cue of the action task and the visual target of the perceptual task. The size of this stimulus–stimulus (S–S) blindness effect did not differ significantly across conditions, showing no effect of response intention and response location. This finding emphasizes the effect of stimulus factors, rather than response factors, of the action event as a source of the blindness to response-compatible stimuli.

Keywords:

• Blindness to response-compatible stimuli
• Stimulus–response compatibility
• Perception and action

Acknowledgments

Akio Nishimura is now at Tohoku University. We thank Tomoko Shobuzawa for collecting and analysing the data for Experiment 1. This study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science awarded to K.Y. Portions of this research were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, Canada, in November 2005.

Notes

¹ In Experiment 1, we recruited 20 participants, and 8 of them were excluded from the statistical analyses. In Experiment 2, we recruited 21 participants, and 11 of them were excluded. Due to technical reasons we did not use a duration adaptation, which had been used in many blindness studies. Without a duration adaptation, there were potential ceiling and floor effects with some participants whose overall performance was too good or too poor in the present study. Therefore, the data from these participants were excluded from the analyses. We do not think that this affected the validity of the data analyses, because what is important in the blindness effect is the effect of a feature of an action event on the perception of a near-threshold visual target. The results in the present study are based on the data with such a visual target because of the exclusion of the data from participants with ceiling or floor effects.

² See Footnote 1.