Five shades of grey: Generalization in distractor-based retrieval of S-R episodes

Binding theories assume that a stimulus and a response made to it are bound together, as in the case of the theory of event coding, in an event file (Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(05), 849-937, 2001). This binding occurs after even a single encounter with the stimulus and the response. Repeating any part of the event file will cause the entire file to be retrieved. However not only are relevant stimuli bound with responses but even irrelevant stimuli that co-occur with the target can be bound with the response, and repeating such a distractor will result in the event file being retrieved. Yet previous studies focused on retrieval effects due to repetition of the same distractor. In this experiment we analysed whether perceptually similar distractors still influence actions due to distractor-based retrieval of responses. Thirty-one participants responded to the shape of the stimulus while ignoring the luminance (5 different shades of grey). The similarity of the stimulus luminance between two consecutive trials influenced response times on response repetition trials. Response repetition effects were particularly facilitated with exact repetitions of the irrelevant feature luminance, and the strength of this effect diminished with increasing dissimilarity of luminance in a linear fashion. We conclude that response-retrieval effects due to distractor bindings follow the rules of generalization, as discussed in the conditioning literature.