Sequential modulation of across-task congruency in the serial reaction time task☆
Section snippets
General method
In both experiments, we used a combination of a visual-manual two-choice task (primary task, left hand) with a four-choice SRTT (secondary task, right hand). Differently from many SRTT studies with four stimuli and four response locations in a horizontal row (e.g., Deroost & Soetens, 2006; Röttger et al., 2019), the SRTT stimuli in this study were presented on either up, left, right, or down side of the two-choice task. Program code, data and Appendix are available online (Zhao, 2020, //osf.io/gvknb/
Participants
A-priori power analysis was conducted using G*Power 3.1 (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009) to test the difference between random, ordinal position and fixed sequence blocks (one number of groups and three numbers of measurements) using ANOVA repeated measures within factors test, an effect size (ηp2 = 0.25), and α = 0.05. Result indicated that a sample size of 28 would be sufficient to achieve a statistical power (1 − β) = 0.80. Thirty volunteers (20 females) in the lab at the University
Experiment 2
The sequential modulation of the across-task congruency effect needs a replication. This is also true for the lack of effects of ordinal position sequence knowledge and of local repetition constraints in Experiment 1. Based on this focus, Experiment 2 contained fixed sequence and ordinal position random blocks only with 5 blocks and was otherwise identical to Experiment 1.
General discussion
Pairing the SRTT with a task with a random sequence of stimuli has been reported to suppress acquisition (Schwarb & Schumacher, 2012) as well as usage of already acquired sequence knowledge (e.g., Frensch, Lin, & Buchner, 1998). In past studies, across-task integration has been used as an explanation for such detriments (Rah, Reber, & Hsiao, 2000; Röttger et al., 2019; Schmidtke & Heuer, 1997). When pairing the SRTT with a task with random sequence of stimuli and responses, compound encoding
Funding acknowledgement
This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), grants no [GA 2246/1-1; HA 5447/11-1] within SPP 1772 – Priority Program Human performance under multiple cognitive task requirements: From basic mechanisms to optimized task scheduling.
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2022, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :The purpose of the secondary task with a random stimulus sequence was to increase the contrast between participants informed vs. not informed about the presence of a fixed and repeating sequence. Even with a short sequence in the SRTT (Zhao et al., 2019, 2020) the secondary task should secure that explicit knowledge is largely absent in the not-informed group while it is present in the informed group. Explicit learning of a fixed and repeating sequence could lead to changes in the tuning of modules with practice based on the anticipation of the sequence (cf. Tubau et al., 2007; Tubau & López-Moliner, 2004).
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All authors declare to have no competing interest.