The official soundtrack to “Five shades of grey”: Generalization in multimodal distractor-based retrieval

Abstract

When responding to two events in a sequence, the repetition or change of stimuli and the accompanying response can benefit or interfere with response execution: Full repetition leads to benefits in performance while partial repetition leads to costs. Additionally, even distractor stimuli can be integrated with a response, and can, upon repetition, lead to benefits or interference. Recently it has been suggested that not only identical, but also perceptually similar distractors retrieve a previous response (Singh et al., Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(8), 2307-2312, 2016): Participants discriminated four visual shapes appearing in five different shades of grey, the latter being irrelevant for task execution. Exact distractor repetitions yielded the strongest distractor-based retrieval effect, which decreased with increasing dissimilarity between shades of grey. In the current study, we expand these findings by conceptually replicating Singh et al. (2016) using multimodal stimuli. In Experiment 1 (N=31), participants discriminated four visual targets accompanied by five auditory distractors. In Experiment 2 (N=32), participants discriminated four auditory targets accompanied by five visual distractors. We replicated the generalization of distractor-based retrieval – that is, the distractor-based retrieval effect decreased with increasing distractor-dissimilarity. These results not only show that generalization in distractor-based retrieval occurs in multimodal feature processing, but also that these processes can occur for distractors perceived in a different modality to that of the target.

Saccadic landing positions reveal that eye movements are affected by distractor-based retrieval

“…These trials were quite common (N = 1100, 16.53% of trials). We further excluded all trials in which the fixation interval between prime and probe lasted longer than 600 ms (N = 320, 4.81% of trials) to control for two things: First, when distractor-response binding effects are investigated, typically an interval of 500 ms between prime response and probe target is used, yielding strong binding effects (e.g., Frings, 2011;Frings et al, 2007;Schöpper, Singh, & Frings, 2020;Singh et al, 2016); however, distractor-based retrieval is known to decline over a short period of time and is absent when using intervals of 2,000 ms (Frings, 2011). Second, a longer fixation interval might have resulted from unstable fixations, but also from additional uninstructed eye movements prior to the fixation of the fixation dot.…”

“…Thereby, if distractor repetitions or changes affect response repetitions and changes, it can be deduced that these were due to distractor-response binding and not to distractor-target binding (see Giesen & Rothermund, 2014; note, however, that target repetitions in response repetitions do not necessarily lead to different distractor-response binding effects than target changes in response repetitions, Schöpper, Singh, & Frings, 2020). In response-change trials, there was no stimulus repetition as well; however, in these the letter change always indicated giving the other response.…”

Same, but different: Binding effects in auditory, but not visual detection performance

“…In discrimination tasks, visual (e.g., Frings et al, 2007), auditory (e.g., Moeller et al, 2012), and audiovisual (e.g., Schöpper, Singh, & Frings, 2020) stimuli yield strong binding effects, and do not suggest any modality-differences for the underlying binding processes. In sharp contrast, the present results suggest such modality differences for detection performance.…”

“…Target stimuli were sine wave tones with a frequency of 361 Hz (62 dB; directly measured at earpad) and 712 Hz (74 dB) (frequencies used by Mondor & Leboe, 2008), created in Audacity (Audacity Team), and were presented via headset (Creative Labs Fatal1ty HS-800 Gaming Headset). In contrast to Mondor and Leboe (2008), both frequencies were also slightly distinct by loudness (e.g., as in Schöpper, Singh, & Frings, 2020). Each sound lasted 100 ms, including a linear amplitude on-and offset of 20 ms to avoid on-/ offset clicks.…”

“…From prime to probe, a response-defining feature and a response-irrelevant feature is orthogonally varied to repeat or change. Crucially, when information from prime to probe only partially repeats (e.g., response repetition with change of response-irrelevant feature), probe reaction times and/or error rates increase (e.g., Frings et al, 2007;Hilchey et al, 2018;Schöpper, Singh, & Frings, 2020;Singh et al, 2016).…”