Effects of spatial response coding on distractor processing: evidence from auditory spatial negative priming tasks...

Prior studies of spatial negative priming indicate that distractor-assigned keypress responses are inhibited as part of visual, but not auditory, processing. However, recent evidence suggests that static keypress responses are not directly activated by spatially presented sounds and, therefore, might not call for an inhibitory process. In order to investigate the role of response inhibition in auditory processing, we used spatially directed responses that have been shown to result in direct response activation to irrelevant sounds. Participants localized a target sound by performing manual joystick responses (Experiment 1) or head movements (Experiment 2B) while ignoring a concurrent distractor sound. Relations between prime distractor and probe target were systematically manipulated (repeated vs. changed) with respect to identity and location. Experiment 2A investigated the influence of distractor sounds on spatial parameters of head movements toward target locations and showed that distractor-assigned responses are immediately inhibited to prevent false responding in the ongoing trial. Interestingly, performance in Experiments 1 and 2B was not generally impaired when the probe target appeared at the location of the former prime distractor and required a previously withheld and presumably inhibited response. Instead, performance was impaired only when prime distractor and probe target mismatched in terms of location or identity, which fully conforms to the feature-mismatching hypothesis. Together, the results suggest that response inhibition operates in auditory processing when response activation is provided but is presumably too short-lived to affect responding on the subsequent trial.