Heuer Herbert, Seegelke Christian, Wühr Peter
Leibniz Research Center for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo), DE.
Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.
J Cogn. 2023 Jan 13;6(1):8. doi: 10.5334/joc.252. eCollection 2023.
The dynamics of congruency effects in conflict tasks can be analyzed by means of delta plots which depict the reaction-time differences between incongruent and congruent conditions across the quantiles of the reaction-time distributions. Delta plots exhibit a variety of different shapes. Here we test the hypothesis that staggered onsets of processing task-relevant and task-irrelevant features for response selection (together with a declining influence of the irrelevant feature) produce such variety. For this purpose, staggered onsets were implemented in two extensions of the Leaky, Competing Accumulator model. We show the cardinal capability of these models to produce different shapes of delta plots with different assumptions about temporal offsets between processing relevant and irrelevant stimulus features. Applying the models to experimental data, we first show that they can reproduce the delta plots observed with a conflict task with stimulus size as the irrelevant feature. For this task congruency effects are delayed and appear only at longer reaction times. Second, we fit the models to the results of two new Simon-task experiments with an experimentally controlled temporal offset in addition to the internal one. The experimentally induced variations of the shape of delta plots for this task could be reasonably well fitted by one of the two models that assumed an early start of response selection as soon as either the relevant or the irrelevant stimulus feature becomes available. We conclude that delta plots are crucially shaped by staggered onsets of processing relevant and irrelevant features for response selection.
冲突任务中一致性效应的动态变化可以通过增量图进行分析，增量图描绘了反应时分布各分位数上不一致和一致条件之间的反应时差异。增量图呈现出各种不同的形状。在此，我们检验这样一种假设，即用于反应选择的与任务相关和与任务无关特征的处理起始时间错开（以及无关特征的影响逐渐减弱）会产生这种多样性。为此，在泄漏竞争累加器模型的两个扩展版本中实现了错开的起始时间。我们展示了这些模型的基本能力，即通过对处理相关和无关刺激特征之间的时间偏移做出不同假设，来产生不同形状的增量图。将这些模型应用于实验数据，我们首先表明它们能够重现以刺激大小作为无关特征的冲突任务中观察到的增量图。对于这个任务，一致性效应会延迟出现，并且只在较长反应时出现。其次，我们将模型拟合到两个新的西蒙任务实验结果中，除了内部时间偏移外，实验还控制了时间偏移。对于这个任务，实验诱导的增量图形状变化可以被两个模型之一较好地拟合，这两个模型假设一旦相关或无关刺激特征可用，反应选择就尽早开始。我们得出结论，增量图的关键形状是由用于反应选择的相关和无关特征的错开起始时间决定的。
