title: Long-term response-stimulus associations can influence distractor-response bindings.
abstract: Strong associations between target stimuli and responses usually facilitate fast and effortless reactions. The present study investigated whether long-term associations between distractor stimuli and responses modulate behavior. In particular, distractor stimuli can affect behavior due to distractor-based stimulus-response retrieval, a phenomenon called distractor-response binding: An ignored stimulus becomes temporarily associated with a response and retrieves it at stimulus repetition. In a flanker task, participants ignored left and right pointing arrows and responded to a target letter either with left and right (strongly associated) responses or with upper and lower (weakly associated) responses. Binding effects were modulated in dependence of the long-term association strength between distractors and responses. If the association was strong (arrows pointing left and right with left and right responses), binding effects emerged but only in case of compatible responses. If the long-term association between distractors and responses was weak (arrows pointing left and right with upper and lower responses), binding was weaker and not modulated by compatibility. In contrast, sequential compatibility effects were not modulated by association strength between distractor and response. The results indicate that existing long-term associations between stimuli responses may modulate the impact of an ignored stimulus on action control.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Germany.
authors.forename: Birte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Moeller
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Germany.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Frings
keywords: action control; distractor-response binding; learning; long-term associations; short-term stimulus- response bindings