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Published on: March 25, 2014
Stimulus-response compatibility in intensity-force relations
Stefan Mattes1, Hartmut Leuthold, Rolf Ulrich
1DaimlerChrysler Corporation, Stuttgart, Germany.
Abstract:
Romaiguère, Hasbroucq, Possamaï, and Seal (1993) reported a new compatibility effect from a task that required responses of two different target force levels to stimuli of two different intensities. Reaction times were shorter when high and low stimulus intensities were mapped to strong and weak force presses respectively than when this mapping was reversed. We conducted six experiments to refine the interpretation of this effect. Experiments 1 to 4 demonstrated that the compatibility effect is clearly larger for auditory than for visual stimuli. Experiments 5 and 6 generalized this finding to a task where stimulus intensity was irrelevant. This modality difference refines Romaiguère et al.'s (1993) symbolic coding interpretation by showing that modality-specific codes underlie the intensity-force compatibility effect. Possible accounts in terms of differences in the representational mode and action effects are discussed.
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