Responding, fast and slow: Visual detection and localization performance is unaffected by retrieval

According to action control theories, responding to a stimulus leads to the binding of the response and stimulus features into an event file. Repeating any component of the latter retrieves previous information, affecting ongoing performance. Based on years of attentional orienting research, recent boundaries of such binding theories have been proposed as binding effects are fully absent in visual detection (e.g., Schöpper et al., 2020, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(4), 2085-2097) and localization (e.g., Schöpper & Frings, 2022; Visual Cognition, 30(10), 641-658) performance. While this can be attributed to specific task demands, the possibility remains that retrieval of previous event files is hampered in such tasks due to overall fast responding. In the current study we instructed participants to signal the detection (Experiment 1) and location (Experiment 2) of dots orthogonally repeating or changing their nonspatial identity and location. Crucially, the dots were either hard or easy to perceive. As expected, making targets hard to perceive drastically slowed down detection and localization response speed. Importantly, binding effects were absent irrespective of perceptibility. In contrast, discriminating the nonspatial identity of targets (Experiment 3) showed strong binding effects. These results highlight the impact of task-dependence for binding approaches in action control.

Response inhibition in the Negative Compatibility Effect in the absence of inhibitory stimulus features

The Negative Compatibility Effect (NCE) is a reversal in priming effects that can occur when a masked arrow prime is followed by an arrow target at a long stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA). To test the explanation that the NCE is actually a positive priming effect elicited by mask features associated with the prime-opposed response, we devise masks that always point in the same direction as the prime, eliminating all antiprime features. We find large positive priming effects for arrow primes without masks and for arrow masks without primes. When a neutral mask is introduced, priming effects turn negative at long SOAs. In the critical case where the mask is an arrow in the same direction as the prime, the prime does not add to the positive priming effect from the mask shape, but instead strongly diminishes it and induces response errors even though all stimuli point in the same direction. No such feature-free inhibition is seen when arrows are replaced by color stimuli. We conclude that even though response activation by stimulus features plays a role in the NCE, there is a strong inhibitory component (though perhaps not in all feature domains) that is not based on visual features.