Meiran Nachshon, Pereg Maayan
1 Department of Psychology and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Exp Psychol. 2017 Jan;64(1):37-48. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000349.
Novel stimulus-response associations are retrieved automatically even without prior practice. Is this true for novel cue-task associations? The experiment involved miniblocks comprising three phases and task switching. In the INSTRUCTION phase, two new stimuli (or familiar cues) were arbitrarily assigned as cues for up-down/right-left tasks performed on placeholder locations. In the UNIVALENT phase, there was no task cue since placeholder's location afforded one task but the placeholders were the stimuli that we assigned as task cues for the following BIVALENT phase (involving target locations affording both tasks). Thus, participants held the novel cue-task associations in memory while executing the UNIVALENT phase. Results show poorer performance in the first univalent trial when the placeholder was associated with the opposite task (incompatible) than when it was compatible, an effect that was numerically larger with newly instructed cues than with familiar cues. These results indicate automatic retrieval of newly instructed cue-task associations.
即使没有事先练习，新的刺激-反应关联也会自动被检索出来。对于新的线索-任务关联来说也是如此吗？该实验包括由三个阶段和任务切换组成的微型组块。在指令阶段，两个新的刺激（或熟悉的线索）被任意指定为在占位符位置上执行上下/左右任务的线索。在单值阶段，由于占位符的位置只允许执行一个任务，所以没有任务线索，但占位符是我们为接下来的双值阶段（涉及两个任务都适用的目标位置）指定为任务线索的刺激。因此，参与者在执行单值阶段时将新的线索-任务关联保存在记忆中。结果表明，当占位符与相反任务（不兼容）相关联时，在第一个单值试验中的表现比与兼容任务相关联时更差，新指示线索的这种效应在数值上比熟悉线索的更大。这些结果表明新指示的线索-任务关联会自动被检索出来。
