Effect of an initiating action on the up-right/down-left advantage for vertically arrayed stimuli and horizontally arrayed responses.
When up and down stimuli are mapped to left and right keypresses or "left" and "right" vocalizations in a 2-choice reaction task, performance is often better with the up-right/down-left mapping than with the opposite mapping. This study investigated whether performance is influenced by the type of initiating action. In all, 4 experiments showed the up-right/down-left advantage to be reduced when the participant's initiating action was a left response compared with when it was a right response. This reduction occurred when the initiating action and response were both keypresses, both were spoken location names, and one was a spoken location name and the other a keypress. The results are consistent with the view that the up-right/down-left advantage is due to asymmetry in coding the alternatives on each dimension, and a distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial codes seems to provide the best explanation of the advantage.
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Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, USA. proctor@psych.purdue.edu
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D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D008606:Mental Processes; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time