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Related Experiment Videos

Estimating the quantitative relation between incongruent information and response time.

Dirk Kerzel1, Matthias Weigelt, Simone Bosbach

  • 1Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, 40 Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, CH-1205 Genève, Switzerland. dirk.kerzel@pse.unige.ch

Acta Psychologica
|January 28, 2006
PubMed
Summary

More distracting information slows reaction times in flanker tasks, but this effect plateaus when the visual display becomes too cluttered. This suggests a limit to how much irrelevant information impacts cognitive processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

  • The Eriksen flanker task demonstrates that incongruent, task-irrelevant cues impair performance.
  • Previous research indicates that the spatial distance of distractors influences their impact.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how the quantity of incongruent, task-irrelevant information affects response selection.
  • To determine if the impact of distractors depends on their quantity or just their presence.

Main Methods:

  • Participants performed a motion discrimination task involving a central point-light walker.
  • The central walker was flanked by varying numbers (two, four, or eight) of peripheral point-light walkers at a constant distance.
  • Reaction times and accuracy were measured.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Reaction times significantly increased with a greater number of incongruent flanking walkers.
  • The detrimental effect of incongruent information showed signs of saturation as the total number of walkers increased (display clutter).

Conclusions:

  • The quantity of incongruent information amplifies interference in response selection.
  • Cognitive processing of distractors saturates in cluttered environments, suggesting a capacity limit.