Pooling it all together – the role of distractor pool size on stimulus-response binding

ABSTRACT

Distractors and responses are integrated in an event file when they occur together. Further, when all or some features repeat, the whole event file is retrieved, affecting later action as observed in so-called binding effects. Previous research used varying distractor pool sizes (ranging from just two to well over 30) to choose distractors from, but it is unclear whether distractor pool size has an effect on the size of distractor-based binding effects. The present study investigates, if and how distractor pool size modulates binding effects. Using an adapted prime-probe design, participants were assigned to large (384 distractors) or small (2 distractors) distractor pool sizes, and distractor-response binding effects were measured. Binding effects were stronger for the large distractor pool condition compared to the small pool condition. We discuss these findings against the background of the negative priming literature and research on novelty.

KEYWORDS:

• Action control
• stimulus–response binding
• distractor-response binding
• distractor pool sizes

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in “PsychArchives” at https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.5207 .

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Please note that we refer to the whole effect pattern of costs and benefits as S-R bindings or binding, while we refer to the process of event file creation as integration. This differs from some studies that use the term binding for the whole effect pattern as well as the creation processes. We use integration instead of binding to avoid confusion between the effect and the process.

2 We choose the label distractor pool size to avoid confusion with the already existing label set size which refers to the amount of stimuli that are presented simultaneously in as single display.

3 Different from studies from the DRB literature, NP studies did not use a fixed pool of distractors that varied in size. Instead, they intermixed novel stimuli with repeating stimuli. For example, Grison and Strayer (2001) used 1016 words. 16 of which were repeatedly presented while the remaining words were only presented once throughout the experiment.

4 Each trial a random distractor was taken from these two available distractors.

5 Note that this is a different way of representation for the two-way interaction between response relation and distractor relation. Thus, a comparison between these binding effects in the two distractor pool conditions comes down to the same comparison as the three-way interaction between response relation, distractor relation and distractor pool condition. This is evident when the comparing the results of the respective t-test and the results of the ANOVA. The square-root of the F-Value for the critical three-way interaction (i.e., The t-value) is equal to the t-value of the respective t-test and the p-values of both comparisons are identical.

6 Proportion of trials removed: 6% due to wrong prime response; 4% due to cut-of criterion; and 6% due to wrong probe response.

7 Note that in half of the response repetition trials targets repeated as well. Hence, feature integration and retrieval between target and distractor stimuli could have contributed to the reported binding effects (e.g., Giesen & Rothermund, 2015). However, the result pattern was the same if target repetition trials were excluded from the analyses, confirming our interpretation of S–R binding effects.

8 DRB effects: Block 1: M = 16.45 ms, SD = 63, Block 2: M = 32 ms, SD = 64, Block 3: M = 23 ms, SD = 38, lock 1: M = 18ms, SD = 76

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number FOR 2790,MO 2839/2-2].