The enhanced Simon effect for older adults is reduced when the irrelevant location information is conveyed by an accessory stimulus

Proctor, Robert W.; Pick, David; Vu, Kim‐Phuong L.; Anderson, Rachael E.

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2004.10.014

Cited by 66 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…In Experiment 2, Castel et al also tested Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, and the results were similar to those for healthy older adults: The Simon effect of mild AD patients increased over time. In contrast to these studies showing a positive slope for older adults' Simon effect functions, for the standard color Simon task, Proctor, Pick, Vu, and Anderson (2005) and Vu and Proctor (2008) found a decrease of the Simon effect across RT bins for healthy older adults that was not significantly different from that for younger adults. These results suggest that the difficulty in ignoring/suppressing activation from irrelevant stimulus location evidenced by older adults in other studies may be a consequence of the relevant stimulus dimension also conveying spatial information.…”

Section: Distributional Analyses Of the Simon Effectmentioning

confidence: 65%

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

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Since 1994, group reaction time (RT) distribution analyses of spatial correspondence effects have been used to evaluate the dynamics of the spatial Simon effect, a benefit of correspondence of stimulus location information with response location for tasks in which stimulus location is irrelevant. We review the history and justification for analyzing group RT distributions and clarify which conditions result in the Simon effect decreasing across the distribution and which lead to flat or increasing functions. Although the standard left-right Simon effect typically yields a function for which the effect decreases as RT increases, in most other task variations, the Simon effect remains stable or increases across the RT distribution. Studies that have used other means of evaluating the temporal dynamics of the Simon effect provide converging evidence that the changes in the Simon effect across the distribution are due mainly to temporal activation properties, an issue that has been a matter of some dispute.Keywords Correspondence effects . Delta plots . Simon effect . Stimulus-response compatibility . Time course of processing In the late 1960s and early 1970s, J. R. Simon reported the results of reaction time (RT) studies in which participants made a left or right manual response to a feature of a stimulus (e.g., red-green color of a visual stimulus) presented in a left or a right location (see Fig. 1; see, e.g., Simon & Small, 1969; see Simon, 1990, for a review). RT was shorter when stimulus and response locations corresponded than when they did not, a result called the Simon effect (Hedge & Marsh, 1975). This two-choice task has come to be prototypical, and we refer to it and the resulting Simon effect as standard. The term Simon effect has been extended to include correspondence effects for other irrelevant stimulus dimensions that overlap with, or are similar to, a response dimension (Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990), but we focus on task variations that entail correspondence of spatial information and manual responses.Studies of the Simon effect and related correspondence effects focused on differences in mean RT at first (see Lu & Proctor, 1995), and these differences are still the focal point of a lot of investigations. However, beginning with De Jong, Liang, and Lauber (1994), many authors have also reported analyses of the RT distributions, dividing them into quantiles, or bins, that contain RTs in the range of percentile values (e.g., between the 50th and 60th percentiles) and measuring the Simon effect for each bin. De Jong et al. (1994) found that the Simon effect for visual tasks was largest at the short RT bins and decreased across the distribution. This result has typically been attributed to rapid activation of the response code corresponding to the irrelevant location feature, followed by decrease of that activation. But, this temporal activation account has been debated (e.g., Roswarski & Proctor, 2003;Zhang & Kornblum, 1997), and the pattern of decreasing effect size across the RT di...

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Section: Distributional Analyses Of the Simon Effectmentioning

confidence: 65%

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

2011

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“…In a typical accessory Simon task, participants engage in a task that requires responses to a central visual target using response keys arranged horizontally. In this case, responses are faster when a task-irrelevant visual or auditory accessory stimulus is presented on the same side as the appropriate response key than when it is presented on the side opposite to this response key (see, e.g., Proctor, Pick, Vu, & Anderson, 2005). Such results indicate that irrelevant visual or auditory stimuli are strong enough to activate a spatial congruent response in spite of the fact that they are irrelevant to the task and may even involve a different modality.…”

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confidence: 74%

Effects of laterality and pitch height of an auditory accessory stimulus on horizontal response selection: The Simon effect and the SMARC effect

Nishimura

Yokosawa

2009

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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“…This finding suggests that the larger Simon effect for older adults is not due to proportional slowing (see Proctor, Pick, Vu, & Anderson, 2005).…”

Section: Reaction Timementioning

confidence: 87%

Age differences in response selection for pure and mixed stimulus–response mappings and tasks

Proctor

2008

Acta Psychologica

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Two experiments examined effects of mixed stimulus-response mappings and tasks for older and younger adults. In Experiment 1, participants performed two-choice spatial reaction tasks with blocks of pure and mixed compatible and incompatible mappings. In Experiment 2, a compatible or incompatible mapping was mixed with a Simon task for which the mapping of stimulus color to location was relevant and stimulus location irrelevant. In both experiments older adults showed larger mixing costs than younger adults and larger compatibility effects, with the differences particularly pronounced in Experiment 1 when location mappings were mixed. In mixed conditions, when stimulus location was relevant, older adults benefited more than younger adults from complete repetition of the task and stimulus from the preceding trial. When stimulus location was irrelevant, the benefit of complete repetition did not differ reliably between age groups. The results suggest that the age-related deficit associated with mixing mappings and tasks is primarily due to older adults having more difficulty separating task sets that activate conflicting response codes.

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The enhanced Simon effect for older adults is reduced when the irrelevant location information is conveyed by an accessory stimulus

Cited by 66 publications

References 24 publications

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

Reaction time distribution analysis of spatial correspondence effects

Effects of laterality and pitch height of an auditory accessory stimulus on horizontal response selection: The Simon effect and the SMARC effect

Age differences in response selection for pure and mixed stimulus–response mappings and tasks

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