Inter-Trial Variability of Context Influences the Binding Structure in a Stimulus-Response Episode

Journal of Cognition, vol. 5, pp. 25

Abstract

). However, in an auditory negative priming study in which participants were required to respond to the target stimulus and to ignore the distractor stimulus, context information (i.e., a completely task-irrelevant stimulus) was found to rather modulate the binding between the distractor stimulus and the response, instead of entering into a binary binding with the response itself (Mayr et al., 2018). The current study demonstrates that simply increasing the variability of the context across trials leads to a binary binding between the context and the response. The same auditory negative priming task was implemented, and participants were either assigned to the high-variability group (8 different context sounds) or the low-variability group (2 different context sounds). For the low-variability group, results replicated previous findings of contextual modulation of the binding between the distractor stimulus and the response. For the high-variability group, however, repetition of the context per se retrieved the prime response, indicating a binary binding between the context and the response. Together, the current findings provide evidence that the inter-trial variability of context information is a determinant of how context is bound in a stimulus-response episode. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.

Authors 4

1. Ruyi Qiu corresponding

   University of Passau

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau, Germany

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau

2. Malte Möller

   University of Passau

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau, Germany

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau

3. Iring Koch Aachen Department of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, 52056, Aachen, Germany

   Department of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, 52056, Aachen

4. Susanne Mayr

   University of Passau

   Affiliation as printed

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau, Germany

   Chair of Psychology and Human-Machine Interaction, University of Passau, 94032, Passau