Abstract
Tipper (1985; Q J Exp Psychol A 37:571–590) has suggested that competing responses programmed to distracting stimuli are inhibited based on their relationship to the action being performed. The present paper reports two experiments designed to examine the influence of the terminal action of a task on the allocation of visual attention. Taken together the results suggest that when engaging targets in an environment, which includes distracting stimuli, competing responses are likely to be programmed in parallel and that the relationship between competing responses can include both spatial position and action characteristics.
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Notes
Originally, the volunteers who participated in experiment 2a, where engagement of the target device was required, also completed the protocol for experiment 2b (i.e., the simple aiming movements). However, as an anonymous reviewer pointed out, this within-participant procedure has the potential for carry-over effects. Specifically, experience with the actions in experiment 2a could affect performance in experiment 2b. Thus we reran experiment 2b with a different group of participants.
There was no distractor main effect for total time in experiment 2b (P>0.05)
Although it is often assumed that location and action are organized hierarchically (Rosenbaum et al. 1983), the interaction between location and action in experiment 1 indicates that these planning processes may overlap in time
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank John Moroz for his technical assistance. D.J. Weeks, D. Elliott, R. Chua and E.A. Roy acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Weir, P.L., Weeks, D.J., Welsh, T.N. et al. Influence of terminal action requirements on action-centered distractor effects. Exp Brain Res 149, 207–213 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-002-1358-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-002-1358-4