Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Jul 22;15(7):e0235964. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235964. eCollection 2020.
Simon tasks reveal implicit processing conflicts that arise when the abstract coding of stimulus position is incongruent with coding for location of the output response. Participants were tested with two versions of a Simon task in a counterbalanced order to examine a potential female bias for attending to object characteristics versus object location. Both tasks used a triangle pointing to the left or right. A simple version presented the triangle in an inner or outer position relative to central fixation. A more complex version included a frame surrounding the inner-outer triangle presentation area in order to introduce additional visual elements for left/right visual processing. When the No Frame version was the first presented, there were no sex differences in the Simon effect in either version, which is consistent with results from other studies that did not provide feedback regarding accuracy. When the initial test was the Frame version, we observed a reverse Simon effect for incongruent triangles presented in the left inner position, with females faster than males to identify the incongruent condition versus the congruent (-59 vs -5 msec). In the No Frame condition that followed, females showed a carryover effect from the previous Frame condition, exhibiting positive Simon effects that were two fold larger than males for identifying incongruent stimuli presented in the left and right outer positions. Similar to previous Simon studies, females showed longer overall reaction times than males (~15%). The difference was not related to the Simon effect and is also found in other types of tasks involving early visual processing of objects with location. Based on sex differences in the Simon effect that emerged following initial experience of the triangle adjoining the frame, the present results support a female bias toward broader integration of objects within the context of location.
西蒙任务揭示了当刺激位置的抽象编码与输出反应位置的编码不一致时出现的内隐处理冲突。参与者以平衡的方式接受了两种西蒙任务的测试，以检验女性对关注物体特征与物体位置的潜在偏向。两个任务都使用指向左右的三角形。一个简单的版本呈现了相对于中央固定点在内侧或外侧的三角形。一个更复杂的版本包括一个围绕内-外三角形呈现区域的框架，以引入左右视觉处理的额外视觉元素。当没有框架的版本首先呈现时，在两个版本中，性别差异都没有出现在西蒙效应中，这与其他没有提供准确性反馈的研究结果一致。当最初的测试是框架版本时，我们观察到在左侧内位置呈现的不一致三角形出现了反向西蒙效应，女性比男性更快地识别出不一致的条件与一致的条件（-59 与-5 毫秒）。在随后的没有框架的条件下，女性从之前的框架条件中表现出了延续效应，表现出比男性更大两倍的正西蒙效应，用于识别在左和右外位置呈现的不一致刺激。与之前的西蒙研究类似，女性的总反应时间比男性长（约 15%）。这种差异与西蒙效应无关，在涉及位置上物体的早期视觉处理的其他类型任务中也存在。基于最初经历与框架相邻的三角形后出现的西蒙效应中的性别差异，本研究结果支持女性对物体在位置背景下更广泛整合的偏向。
