[Effect of spatial information in the blindness to response-compatible stimuli]

Targets are identified or detected more accurately when they are presented before or during a response which does not share the same feature with the target, compared with when the response does share the same feature (Müsseler & Hommel, 1997a, 1997b, blindness to response-compatible stimuli). We investigated the effect of spatial information in the blindness effect. Experiment 1 showed that the blindness effect also occurred when the task was to detect the location of stimuli as well as to identify the orientation of an arrow. Experiment 2 showed that when the location of stimuli and response were compatible, the blind effect was reduced although the location was perfectly task-irrelevant. It was suggested that spatial information had a critical role in the blindness effect from action to perception, similar to the case of stimulus-response compatibility where the stimuli affected the response.