Snyder Hope K, Rafferty Sean M, Haaf Julia M, Rouder Jeffery N
210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA.
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2019 Aug;81(6):1944-1950. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01713-8.
The ability to inhibit distractors while focusing on specific targets is crucial. In most tasks, like Stroop or priming, the to-be-ignored distractors affect the response to be more like the distractors. We call this assimilation. Yet, in some tasks, the opposite holds. Constrast occurs when the response is caused to be least like the distractors. Contrast and assimilation are opposing behavioral effects, but they both occur when to-be-ignored information affects judgments. We ask here whether inhibition across contrastive and assimilative tasks is common or distinct. Assimilation and contrast are often thought to have different underlying psychological mechanisms, and we use a correlational analysis with hierarchical Bayesian models as a test of this hypothesis. We designed tasks with large assimilation or contrast effects. The stimuli are morphed letters, and whether there is contrast or assimilation depends on whether the surrounding information is a letter field (contrast) or a word field (assimilation). Critically, a positive correlation was found-individuals who better inhibited contrast-inducing contexts also better inhibited assimilation-inducing contexts. These results indicate that inhibition is common, at least in part, across contrast and assimilation tasks.
在专注于特定目标时抑制干扰因素的能力至关重要。在大多数任务中，如斯特鲁普任务或启动任务，需要被忽略的干扰因素会使反应更类似于干扰因素。我们将此称为同化。然而，在某些任务中，情况则相反。当反应被导致最不像干扰因素时，就会出现对比。对比和同化是相反的行为效应，但当需要被忽略的信息影响判断时，它们都会出现。我们在此探讨在对比性任务和同化性任务中的抑制作用是共通的还是不同的。同化和对比通常被认为具有不同的潜在心理机制，我们使用带有层次贝叶斯模型的相关分析来检验这一假设。我们设计了具有较大同化或对比效应的任务。刺激物是变形字母，是否存在对比或同化取决于周围信息是字母场（对比）还是单词场（同化）。关键的是，我们发现了正相关——在诱导对比的情境中抑制能力更强的个体，在诱导同化的情境中抑制能力也更强。这些结果表明，至少在一定程度上，抑制作用在对比任务和同化任务中是共通的。
