Does feature-based attention play a role in the episodic retrieval of event files?

In stimulus identification tasks, stimulus and response, and location and response information, is thought to become integrated into a common event representation following a response. Evidence for this feature integration comes from paradigms requiring keypress responses to pairs of sequentially presented stimuli. In such paradigms, there is a robust cost when a target event only partially matches the preceding event representation. This is known as the partial repetition cost. Notably, however, these experiments rely on discrimination responses. Recent evidence has suggested that changing the responses to localization or detection responses eliminates partial repetition costs. If changing the response type can eliminate partial repetition costs it becomes necessary to question whether partial repetition costs reflect feature integration or some other mechanism. In the current study, we look to answer this question by using a design that as closely as possible matched typical partial repetition cost experiments in overall stimulus processing and response requirements. Unlike typical experiments where participants make a cued response to a first stimulus before making a discrimination response to a second stimulus, here we reversed that sequence such that participants made a discrimination response to the first stimulus before making a cued response to the second. In Experiment 1, this small change eliminated or substantially reduced the typically large partial repetition costs. In Experiment 2 we returned to the typical sequence and restored the large partial repetition costs. Experiment 3 confirmed these findings, which have implications for interpreting partial repetition costs and for feature integration theories in general. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).