Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, WestLafayette, IN 47907-1364, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2010 Nov;36(6):1554-60. doi: 10.1037/a0020603.
Throughout a lifetime of interaction with the physical environment, people develop a strong bias to respond on the same side as the location of a target object, even when its location is irrelevant to the task at hand. Recent research has shown that this compatibility bias can be overridden with relatively brief but focused training. To better understand how such training affects preexisting response biases, we investigated whether attention is required to acquire and express a new bias to respond on the opposite side, thus creating an incompatibility bias. Participants practiced making responses on the opposite side from left and right tones and then made responses based on the frequencies (high or low) of the same tones. As in previous research, practice with a spatially incompatible mapping eliminated the compatible bias in the Simon task. The addition of an attention load (continuous secondary tracking task) during practice prevented learning the new response bias. However, once the new bias was learned, it overrode the compatibility bias regardless of available attentional resources. We suggest that not only can a quickly learned response bias overwhelm preexisting biases that are acquired over years of experience but that recently learned and older, preexisting biases are similarly affected by attention load.
在与物理环境交互的一生中，人们形成了一种强烈的偏见，即倾向于与目标物体的位置在同一侧做出反应，即使其位置与当前任务无关。最近的研究表明，这种兼容性偏见可以通过相对简短但集中的训练来克服。为了更好地理解这种训练如何影响预先存在的反应偏见，我们研究了是否需要注意力来获得和表达对相反侧做出反应的新偏见，从而产生不兼容性偏见。参与者练习根据左右音调的相反侧做出反应，然后根据相同音调的频率（高或低）做出反应。与之前的研究一样，使用空间不兼容的映射进行练习消除了西蒙任务中的兼容性偏见。在练习过程中增加注意力负荷（连续的次要跟踪任务）会阻止学习新的反应偏见。然而，一旦学习了新的偏见，无论注意力资源是否可用，它都会克服兼容性偏见。我们认为，不仅可以快速学习的反应偏见压倒多年经验获得的预先存在的偏见，而且最近学习的和旧的预先存在的偏见也同样受到注意力负荷的影响。
