title: Actions blind to conceptually overlapping stimuli.
abstract: Participants are worse at identifying spatial symbols (arrowheads) while performing spatially compatible manual key presses. The present experiments investigated the generality of this "blindness effect" to response-compatible stimuli. In Experiment 1 a left key press deteriorated the identification of left-pointing arrows, and a right key press deteriorated the perception of right-pointing arrows, independent of the hands used to press the key. Thus the blindness effect is based on codes of the distal response location rather than on the body-intrinsic anatomical connection of the hands. Experiment 2 extended the blindness effect to verbal responses and written position words (left, right, up, down). Vocalizing a position word blinded to directly compatible position words (e.g., left-left), but not to orthogonally compatible position words (e.g., left-down). This result suggests that the use of identical stimulus-response codes, and not the use of saliency-matching but distinct codes, suffices to produce blindness effects. Finally, Experiment 3 extended the blindness phenomenon beyond the spatial domain by demonstrating blindness between saying color words and perceiving color patches. Altogether, the experiments revealed action-induced blindness to be a phenomenon of broad empirical validity occurring whenever action and perception afford simultaneous access to the same conceptual codes.
authors: Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. w.kunde@psych.uni-halle.de
authors: Wilfried
authors: W
authors: Kunde
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Wühr
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D003118:Color Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics; D012193:Reversal Learning; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior