The tactile Eriksen flanker effect: A time course analysis

Exploring behavioral adjustments of proportion congruency manipulations in an Eriksen flanker task with visual and auditory distractor modalities

The present study investigated global behavioral adaptation effects to conflict arising from different distractor modalities. Three experiments were conducted using an Eriksen flanker paradigm with constant visual targets, but randomly varying auditory or visual distractors. In Experiment 1, the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was varied for both distractor modalities, whereas in Experiments 2A and 2B, this proportion congruency (PC) manipulation was applied to trials with one distractor modality (inducer) to test potential behavioral transfer effects to trials with the other distractor modality (diagnostic). In all experiments, mean proportion congruency effects (PCEs) were present in trials with a PC manipulation, but there was no evidence of transfer to diagnostic trials in Experiments 2A and 2B. Distributional analyses (delta plots) provided further evidence for distractor modality-specific global behavioral adaptations by showing differences in the slope of delta plots with visual but not auditory distractors when increasing the ratio of congruent trials. Thus, it is suggested that distractor modalities constrain global behavioral adaptation effects due to the learning of modality-specific memory traces (e.g., distractor-target associations) and/or the modality-specific cognitive control processes (e.g., suppression of modality-specific distractor-based activation). Moreover, additional analyses revealed partial transfer of the congruency sequence effect across trials with different distractor modalities suggesting that distractor modality may differentially affect local and global behavioral adaptations.

Assessing Inhibitory Control in the Real World Is Virtually Possible: A Virtual Reality Demonstration

Executive functions are the key ingredient for behaviour regulation. Among them, inhibitory control is one of the main exponents of executive functions, and in the last decades, it has received a good amount of attention thanks to the development of chronometric tasks associated with paradigms that allow exploring human behaviour when the inhibitory component is needed. Among the different paradigms typically used, the Simon and flanker tasks are probably the most popular ones. These have been subjected to modifications in order to assess inhibitory control from different perspectives (e.g., in different samples or in combination with different research techniques). However, its use has been relegated to classical presentation modalities within laboratory settings. The accessibility of virtual reality (VR) technology has opened new research avenues to investigate inhibition control with a high ecological validity while retaining tightly controlled lab conditions and good measurement accuracy. We present two cutting-edge modifications of the standard Simon and flanker tasks that have been adapted to real-world settings using VR and human-like avatars as target stimuli. Our findings show that virtual reality is a credible tool for testing inhibitory control with a high degree of transferability and generalizability to the real world.

The time-course of distractor-based activation modulates effects of speed-accuracy tradeoffs in conflict tasks

The cognitive processes underlying the ability of human performers to trade speed for accuracy is often conceptualized within evidence accumulation models, but it is not yet clear whether and how these models can account for decision-making in the presence of various sources of conflicting information. In the present study, we provide evidence that speed-accuracy tradeoffs (SATs) can have opposing effects on performance across two different conflict tasks. Specifically, in a single preregistered experiment, the mean reaction time (RT) congruency effect in the Simon task increased, whereas the mean RT congruency effect in the Eriksen task decreased, when the focus was put on response speed versus accuracy. Critically, distributional RT analyses revealed distinct delta plot patterns across tasks, thus indicating that the unfolding of distractor-based response activation in time is sufficient to explain the opposing pattern of congruency effects. In addition, a recent evidence accumulation model with the notion of time-varying conflicting information was successfully fitted to the experimental data. These fits revealed task-specific time-courses of distractor-based activation and suggested that time pressure substantially decreases decision boundaries in addition to reducing the duration of non-decision processes and the rate of evidence accumulation. Overall, the present results suggest that time pressure can have multiple effects in decision-making under conflict, but that strategic adjustments of decision boundaries in conjunction with different time-courses of distractor-based activation can produce counteracting effects on task performance with different types of distracting sources of information.