title: The role of instructions, practice, and stimulus-hand correspondence on the Simon effect.
abstract: Numerous studies of two-choice reaction tasks, including auditory and visual Simon tasks (i.e., tasks in which stimulus location is irrelevant) and visual compatibility tasks, have found that only spatial stimulus-response (S-R) correspondence affected S-R compatibility. Their results provided no indication that stimulus-hand correspondence was a significant factor. However, Wascher et al. (2001) suggested that hand coding plays a role in visual and auditory Simon tasks when the instructions are in terms of the finger/hand used for responding. The present experiments examined whether instructing subjects in terms of response locations or fingers/hands influenced the Simon effect for visual and auditory tasks. In Experiments 1-3, only spatial S-R correspondence contributed significantly to the Simon effect, even when the instructions were in terms of the fingers/hands. However, in Experiment 4, which used auditory stimuli and finger/hand instructions, the contribution of stimulus-hand correspondence increased with practice.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, Psychology Building 1364, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, USA. roswarst@wabash.edu
authors.forename: Todd Eric
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Roswarski
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Proctor
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D005385:Fingers; D006225:Hand; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D013017:Sound Localization; D013028:Space Perception