Attention meets binding: only attended distractors are used for the retrieval of event files

Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014 May;76(4):959-78. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0648-9.

Abstract

Response-irrelevant stimuli can be encoded with, and later on retrieve, a response given to a relevant stimulus, an effect that is called distractor-response binding. In three experiments using a prime-probe design, we investigated whether the allocation of attention modulates the processes contributing to distractor-response binding. Participants identified letters via keypresses while attending to one of two sets of simultaneously presented but response-irrelevant number stimuli. In different experiments, both spatial attention and feature-based attention were allocated to the response-irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that only attended response-irrelevant stimuli elicited effects of distractor-response binding. In particular, while the encoding of response-irrelevant stimuli and responses was not particularly affected by attention during prime processing, only attended response-irrelevant stimuli in the probe retrieved previous responses. Hence, we show that attention affects action regulation due to modulating the influence of stimulus-response binding on behavior.

Publication types

  • Clinical Trial

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Analysis of Variance
  • Attention / physiology*
  • Cues
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Memory, Short-Term / physiology*
  • Orientation / physiology*
  • Perceptual Masking
  • Reaction Time / physiology
  • Spatial Processing / physiology
  • Young Adult