Abstract
Stimulus displays consisting of a target and a distractor can produce task conflicts when target and distractor are associated with different tasks. The present study examined whether these stimulus-induced task conflicts are affected by priming the irrelevant task or by increasing the salience of the distractor. In a series of three experiments, we employed a task-shifting paradigm in which subjects had to apply one of two judgments to either the global or the local level of a hierarchical stimulus. In each block, the target level and the judgment were either constant or mixed. Stimulus-induced judgment conflicts were measured by comparing performance for stimuli associated with two judgments and stimuli associated with only one. It turned out that only mixing the target level and not mixing the judgment increased the conflicts. These findings indicate that only the salience of the distractor modulates stimulus-induced conflicts.
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This research was supported by a grant to R.H. from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Hu 432/8-1).
Note—This article was accepted by the previous editorial team, when Colin M. MacLeod was Editor.
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Steinhauser, M., Hübner, R. Automatic activation of task-related representations in task shifting. Memory & Cognition 35, 138–155 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195950
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195950