Backward crosstalk effects in psychological refractory period paradigms: effects of second-task response types on first-task response latencies

Miller, Jeff

doi:10.1007/s00426-005-0011-9

Cited by 85 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(55 reference statements)

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“…Watter and Logan found clear evidence of separable semantic and response priming effects on Task 1 performance from Task 2 at short SOAs, suggesting that Task 2 response information was generated in parallel with attended performance of Task 1 response selection. Miller (2006) provided further evidence of Task 2 response information's exerting an influence on Task 1 performance and extended the findings of previous authors by demonstrating this effect using unrelated tasks. For Task 2 he used a go/no-go task with either auditory (Experiment 1) or visual (Experiment 2) stimuli and found that RTs in the first task were longer when the Task 2 stimulus signaled a no-go response.…”

Section: Challenges To Rsb Theorysupporting

confidence: 84%

Parallel response selection in dual-task situations via automatic category-to-response translation

Thomson

Watter

Finkelshtein

2010

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

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The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm (Telford, 1931) has long been used by psychologists as a tool for investigating people's ability to perform two tasks concurrently. In a typical PRP task, participants are presented with two stimuli in close temporal succession and are required to make a speeded response to each. The characteristic result in this paradigm is that the reaction time (RT) for Task 2 increases as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) decreases, whereas the RT for the first task remains relatively unaffected by SOA. One common interpretation of this finding is that there exists a central-processing b bottleneck in the stage of response selection, such that the selection of an appropriate response to Task 2 cannot b begin until this operation is complete for Task 1 (Pashler, 1984). In this sense, PRP findings demonstrate that for at least the response selection stage of processing, people are strictly unable to do two things at once.Pashler's (1994) response selection bottleneck (RSB) theory of dual-task performance relies on the locus-ofslack logic, which assumes that tasks can be divided into p processing stages that are serial and discrete. Processing stages of the two tasks in a PRP paradigm can run in p parallel until the response selection stage; here, there is a b bottleneck that permits this processing stage to be comp pleted for only one task at a time. The RSB theory therefore proposes that the response selection stages of the two tasks are serial and discrete with respect to each other, and this has generally accounted well for demonstrations of the PRP effect (for reviews, see Pashler, 1994;Pashler & Johnston, 1998). Challenges to RSB TheoryMore recently, several authors have taken an interest in testing this discreteness assumption. Kieras (1997a, 1997b) proposed the executive-process interactive control (EPIC) architecture, which assumes that parallel processing is, in fact, possible in multiple-task performance and that delays in Task t 2 performance at short SOAs in PRP studies are due to strategic response deferd ment. Jolicoeur (2002, 2003) and Navon and Miller (2002) have argued for a central capacity-sharing or divisible resource model, in which PRP effects are due to capacity-limited processes that permit graded capacity sharing across tasks, rather than to a strict all-or-none bottleneck.Cross-talk effects between tasks have also been examined. Logan and Schulkind (2000) presented four experiments demonstrating retrieval of semantic information about their Task 2 stimuli (S2) occurring in parallel with the processing of Task 1 stimuli (S1). They used a PRP paradigm with letter/digit (Experiment r 1), magnitude or parity (Experiment 2), or word/nonword (Experiments 3 and 4) discrimination tasks and found that Task 1 RT was f shorter when the category of S2 matched the category of S1 (e.g., both were letters) and Task 1 and Task 2 were the same. This finding suggests that participants were able to retrieve the semantic category of S2 early enough that this info...

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Section: Challenges To Rsb Theorysupporting

confidence: 84%

Parallel response selection in dual-task situations via automatic category-to-response translation

Thomson

Watter

Finkelshtein

2010

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics

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“…This conclusion seems to conflict with our finding of a parallel execution of an irrelevant comparison operation while the subject should be focusing on the initial arithmetic operation. However, more recently PRP studies have uncovered evidence compatible with a partial overlap of stages, which is often interpreted as ''central resource sharing" (Hommel, 1998;Miller, 2005;Miller & Alderton, 2006;Tombu & Jolicoeur, 2003, 2005. The most crucial finding, similar to ours, is that of crosstalk between responses to the first and to the second stimuli: even the response times to the first task can be accelerated or slowed down depending on response congruence between 4 Notice that our discussion of the debate over serial and parallel processing leaves aside the classic debate over seriality in such tasks as memory scanning or visual search (Sternberg, 1966;Treisman & Gelade, 1980;Townsend & Wenger, 2004;Wolfe, 1998).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The cognitive architecture for chaining of two mental operations

Sackur

Dehaene

2009

Cognition

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a b s t r a c tA simple view, which dates back to Turing, proposes that complex cognitive operations are composed of serially arranged elementary operations, each passing intermediate results to the next. However, whether and how such serial processing is achieved with a brain composed of massively parallel processors, remains an open question. Here, we study the cognitive architecture for chained operations with an elementary arithmetic algorithm: we required participants to add (or subtract) two to a digit, and then compare the result with five. In four experiments, we probed the internal implementation of this task with chronometric analysis, the cued-response method, the priming method, and a subliminal forcedchoice procedure. We found evidence for an approximately sequential processing, with an important qualification: the second operation in the algorithm appears to start before completion of the first operation. Furthermore, initially the second operation takes as input the stimulus number rather than the output of the first operation. Thus, operations that should be processed serially are in fact executed partially in parallel. Furthermore, although each elementary operation can proceed subliminally, their chaining does not occur in the absence of conscious perception. Overall, the results suggest that chaining is slow, effortful, imperfect (resulting partly in parallel rather than serial execution) and dependent on conscious control.

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“…The most reliable demonstrations of parallel processing of two tasks come from PRP experiments in which there is substantial compatibility between the response in Task 1 (R1) and the Task 2 response (R2) (Miller, 2006;Miller & Alderton, 2006;Thomson, Watter, & Finkelshtein, 2010;Watter & Logan, 2006). In the simplest case, Watter and Logan (2006) had R1 and R2 given by the same fingers of the same hand.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Backward compatibility effects in younger and older adults

Hartley

Maquestiaux

Festini

et al. 2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

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In many dual-task situations, responses to the second of two tasks are slowed when the time between tasks is short. The response-selection bottleneck model of dual-task performance accounts for this phenomenon by assuming that central processing of the second task is blocked by a bottleneck until central processing of Task 1 is complete. This assumption could be called into question if it could be demonstrated that the response to Task 2 affected the central processing of Task 1, a backward response compatibility effect. Such effects are well-established in younger adults. Backward compatibility effects in older (as well as younger) adults were explored in two experiments. The first experiment found clear backward response compatibility effects for younger adults but no evidence of them for older adults. The second experiment explored backward stimulus compatibility and found similar effects in both younger and older adults. Evidence possibly consistent with some pre-bottleneck processing of Task 2 central stages also was found in the second experiment in both age groups. For younger adults, the results provide further evidence falsifying the claim of an immutable response selection bottleneck. For older adults, the evidence suggested that Task 2 affects Task 1 when there is stimulus compatibility but not when there is response compatibility. Under most circumstances, people cannot perform two tasks at exactly the same time without interference, even when both tasks are very simple. As the temporal overlap between the two tasks increases, the time to perform the second task increases monotonically. Conversely, in many situations for each additional millisecond that the stimulus of the second task is delayed after the onset of the stimulus of the first task (the stimulus onset asynchrony or SOA), the reaction time (RT) to the second task drops by 1 ms. By contrast, the RT to the first task is largely unaffected by SOA. The slowing of the second task at short SOAs often is called the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect by analogy with the time after firing when a neuron is unresponsive to further input (Telford, 1931;Vince, 1948;Welford, 1952). The PRP effect has been replicated in a large number of experiments, thus deserving the status of one of the few laws of contemporary cognitive psychology. Pashler (1994Pashler ( , 1998 provides reviews and overviews of the research and theory (also see Spence, 2008;Tombu & Jolicoeur, 2005).The most successful account of the PRP effect is the response-selection bottleneck (RSB) model, the principal tenet of which is that central processing can be performed for one and only one task at any particular time. Central processing of one of the tasks must be delayed until central processing of the other task is complete. This leads to the prediction that each millisecond by which the arrival of the second task is delayed will be 1 ms that it will not have to wait for the central processing mechanism to become free. Central processing involves processes of mapping...

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Backward crosstalk effects in psychological refractory period paradigms: effects of second-task response types on first-task response latencies

Cited by 85 publications

References 49 publications

Parallel response selection in dual-task situations via automatic category-to-response translation

Parallel response selection in dual-task situations via automatic category-to-response translation

The cognitive architecture for chaining of two mental operations

Backward compatibility effects in younger and older adults

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