title: Attention meets binding: only attended distractors are used for the retrieval of event files.
abstract: Response-irrelevant stimuli can be encoded with, and later on retrieve, a response given to a relevant stimulus, an effect that is called distractor-response binding. In three experiments using a prime-probe design, we investigated whether the allocation of attention modulates the processes contributing to distractor-response binding. Participants identified letters via keypresses while attending to one of two sets of simultaneously presented but response-irrelevant number stimuli. In different experiments, both spatial attention and feature-based attention were allocated to the response-irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that only attended response-irrelevant stimuli elicited effects of distractor-response binding. In particular, while the encoding of response-irrelevant stimuli and responses was not particularly affected by attention during prime processing, only attended response-irrelevant stimuli in the probe retrieved previous responses. Hence, we show that attention affects action regulation due to modulating the influence of stimulus-response binding on behavior.
authors.affiliation: Trier University, Trier, Germany, moellerb@uni-trier.de.
authors.forename: Birte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Moeller
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Frings
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D065855:Spatial Processing / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult