Rey-Mermet Alodie, Meier Beat
Institute of Psychology and Center for Cognition, Learning, and Memory, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Adv Cogn Psychol. 2013 Sep 20;9(3):146-55. doi: 10.2478/v10053-008-0142-9. eCollection 2013.
When switching tasks, occasionally responding to bivalent stimuli (i.e., stimuli with relevant features for two different tasks) slows performance on subsequent univalent stimuli, even when they do not share relevant features with bivalent stimuli. This performance slowing is labelled the bivalency effect. Here, we investigated whether the bivalency effect results from an orienting response to the infrequent stimuli (i.e., the bivalent stimuli). To this end, we compared the impact of responding to infrequent univalent stimuli to the impact of responding to infrequent bivalent stimuli. For the latter, the results showed a performance slowing for all trials following bivalent stimuli. This indicates a long-lasting bivalency effect, replicating previous findings. For infrequent univalent stimuli, however, the results showed a smaller and shorter-lived performance slowing. These results demonstrate that the bivalency effect does not simply reflect an orienting response to infrequent stimuli. Rather it results from the conflict induced by bivalent stimuli, probably by episodic binding with the more demanding context created by them.
在切换任务时，偶尔对二价刺激（即具有与两个不同任务相关特征的刺激）做出反应会减慢后续单价刺激的表现，即使它们与二价刺激不共享相关特征。这种表现减慢被称为二价效应。在此，我们研究了二价效应是否源于对罕见刺激（即二价刺激）的定向反应。为此，我们比较了对罕见单价刺激做出反应的影响与对罕见二价刺激做出反应的影响。对于后者，结果显示在二价刺激后的所有试验中表现都有所减慢。这表明存在持久的二价效应，重复了先前的研究结果。然而，对于罕见单价刺激，结果显示表现减慢的程度较小且持续时间较短。这些结果表明，二价效应并非简单地反映对罕见刺激的定向反应。相反，它是由二价刺激引发的冲突导致的，可能是通过与它们所创造的要求更高的情境进行情景绑定。
