Flanker and negative flanker effects in letter identification

Rouder, Jeffrey N.; King, J. W.

doi:10.3758/bf03194800

Cited by 24 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…The difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in the relative frequency of negative flanker effects was significant for the Frisian and Polish children, but, again, did not reach statistical significance in the Limburgish sample. To our knowledge, negative flanker effects have not been reported explicitly in the literature on bilingualism, despite the fact that the “direction of the flanker effect has been a topic of some controversy” (Rouder and King, 2003, p. 288). It is conceivable that the negative flanker effects contribute to the elusiveness of the effects of bilingualism in studies using Flanker tasks (Paap and Greenberg, 2013; Ross and Melinger, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

et al. 2017

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Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing whether the bilingual cognitive advantage is modulated by the sociolinguistic context of language use. All three bilingual groups were exposed to a minority language besides the nation’s dominant language (Dutch). Two bilingual groups were exposed to a regional language (Frisian, Limburgish), and a third bilingual group was exposed to a migrant language (Polish). All children participated in two working memory tasks (verbal, visuospatial) and two attention tasks (selective attention, interference suppression). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on selective attention. The cognitive effect of bilingualism was most clearly present in the Frisian-Dutch group and in a subgroup of migrant children who were relatively proficient in Polish. The effect was less robust in the Limburgish-Dutch sample. Investigation of the response patterns of the flanker test, testing interference suppression, suggested that bilingual children more often show an effect of response competition than the monolingual children, demonstrating that bilingual children attend to different aspects of the task than monolingual children. No bilingualism effects emerged for verbal and visuospatial working memory.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

et al. 2017

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“…As such, the former finding provides some evidence that the presence of irrelevant and completely noninformative information within a stimulus display can slow responding to target items, even relative to congruent and incongruent flanker situations in which either fully confirming or fully competing irrelevant information is present. Regarding the latter finding, although it does not represent the typical flanker RT effect, note that (1) the mean RT difference between the congruent and incongruent flanker conditions was much smaller for correct than for error responses, (2) poststimulus blank periods were much longer in the incongruent flanker condition, and (3) brief stimulus presentation times followed by a subsequent masking did provide the ideal conditions for the elicitation of negative flanker RT effects (Rouder & King, 2003; in fact, these researchers have postulated that the reason negative flanker effects are not commonly observed is that they are typically overwhelmed by strong response competition effects). The statistical analyses performed on the individual mean confidence and the three calibration indices were also the same as those in the previous experiments (group confidence calibration curves are given in Figure 3).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A. Eriksen and Eriksen's task. Nevertheless, this type of finding is actually a very robust one, which is now more commonly known as the negative flanker effect (Rouder & King, 2003;van Leeuwen & Lachmann, 2004). With respect to confidence measures, though, Keren's (1988) participants were quite overconfident in the repeated-letter condition and quite undercon-computer using Mel 2.0 experimental software randomly presented the stimuli within each block.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 96%

“…First, because they involved negative flanker accuracy effects, the exact nature and locus of the cognitive processes that gave rise to them is still not at all clear (Keren, 1988;Rouder & King, 2003;van Leeuwen & Lachmann, 2004; see also Klapp & Hinkley, 2002). Interestingly, Rouder and King have made the case that the presence of such effects implies that flanker stimuli must, indeed, affect both the perceptual encoding and response generation stages of processing in these kinds of tasks (although the former effect is likely to become more pronounced only when perception of the stimuli is made difficult).…”

Section: Confidencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective attention and subjective confidence calibration

Schoenherr

Leth‐Steensen

Petrusic

2010

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

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Selective AttentionOne paradigm that has been widely used to observe constraints on selective visual attention processing involves B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen's (1974) In the present experiments, failures of selective visual attention were invoked using the B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen (1974) flanker task. On each trial, a three-letter stimulus array was flashed briefly, followed by a mask. The identity of the two flanking letters was response congruent, neutral, or incongruent with the identity of the middle target letter. On half of the trials, confidence ratings were obtained after each response. In the first three experiments, participants were highly overconfident in the accuracy of their responding to incongruent flanker stimulus arrays. In a final experiment, presenting a prestimulus target location cue greatly reduced both selective attention failure and overconfidence. The findings demonstrate that participants are often unaware of such selective attention failures and provide support for the notion that, in these cases, decisional processing is driven largely by the identities of the incongruent flankers. In addition, responding was invariably slower and sometimes more accurate when confidence was required than when it was not required, demonstrating that the need to provide posttrial confidence reports can affect decisional processing. Moreover, there was some evidence that the presence of neutral contextual flanking information can slow responding, suggesting that such nondiagnostic information can, indeed, contribute to decisional processing.

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“…The processing of letters (or words) requires specific rules for interpreting them as symbols, instead of as geometric configurations (Deacon, 2000;Friederici & Lachmann, 2002;Lachmann, 2002;Lachmann & Geyer, 2003). This implies that, at an early level, letters (contrary to shapes) are preferably perceived in isolation from the geometrical characteristics of flankers (Rouder & King, 2003). This may involve the suppression of the feature integration process.…”

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confidence: 99%

Negative and positive congruence effects in letters and shapes

Leeuwen

Lachmann

2004

Perception & Psychophysics

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In six experiments in which a binary classification task was used, letter and nonletter (geometrical shapes, pseudoletters, or rotated letters) targets were presented either in isolation or surrounded by a geometrical shape. The surrounding shape could be congruent or incongruent with the target. When the classification required a distinction between letters and nonletters, either explicitly (Experiments 1-3) or implicitly (Experiment 4), a negative congruence effect was obtained for letters, contrasting with a regular, positive congruence effect for nonletters. When no distinction was to be made, letters and nonletters invariably showed a positive congruence effect (Experiments 5 and 6). In particular, between Experiments 1-4 and Experiments 5 and 6, the occurrence of negative or positive congruence effects for the same stimuli depended on the task. Feature interaction, target selection, and response competition explanations were tested against a feature integration approach. The results are explained in terms of different feature integration strategies for letters and nonletters. CONGRUENCE IN LETTERS AND SHAPES909 sults of even these earliest studies cannot be understood fully on the basis of feature interaction alone. For instance, in Estes (1982), the effect of target-flanker similarity was minimal at an intermediate degree of similarity, a result Estes ascribed to the mediation of higher order processes. These processes are likely to involve task-specific factors.In particular, we may consider the role of task-specific factors in attentional target selection. Distractor information competes for selection when the perceiver is allocating attention to the target. This effect, too, will be stronger the more similar in shape the nontarget is to the target. When the stimulus is complex, the task is difficult, and distractors competing for attention may sometimes have to be suppressed while a target is selected. This provides another possible source of negative congruence effects. Accordingly, the time it takes to classify a target is longer if it is surrounded by nontargets of similar shape than if it is surrounded by ones of different shape (Bavelier, Deruelle, & Proksch, 2000;Briand, 1994;van Leeuwen & Bakker, 1995). These effects contrast with those usually obtained in more simple displays, where the time it takes to classify a target is shorter when congruent distractors surround it than when it is surrounded by incongruent ones. The latter, positive congruence effects have been studied extensively and are generally attributed to competition of late response-related processes (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974). According to the literature, these effects are characteristic of simple stimuli, because when the task is easy (Lavie, 1995), attention recruited for feature integration (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) spills over to irrelevant stimulus attributes. When these call for a response opposite to that of the target, response competition will result.In sum, the effects of irrelevant surrounding information are commonly ex...

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Flanker and negative flanker effects in letter identification

Cited by 24 publications

References 33 publications

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

Selective attention and subjective confidence calibration

Negative and positive congruence effects in letters and shapes

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