Conditional and unconditional automaticity: A dual-process model of effects of spatial stimulusesponse correspondence.

TLDR

Possible connectionist implementations of the conditional mechanism are discussed. The study uses distributional analyses and event‑related brain potentials to demonstrate that irrelevant spatial stimulus‑response correspondence effects comprise two qualitatively distinct automatic components. The authors identify an unconditional priming component triggered by abrupt stimulus onset that is independent of task demands, and a conditional component reflecting automatic generalization of task‑defined transformations to spatial codes, also independent of relative response speed. The unconditional component exhibits a biphasic pattern, with initial facilitation followed by inhibition, analogous to spatial‑cueing effects in visual detection tasks.

Abstract

Distributional analyses and event-related brain potential were used to show that effects of irrelevant spatial stimulus-response correspondence consist of 2 qualitatively different automatic components that can be distinguished on the basis of their dependencies on relative response speed and on computational requirements of the primary task. One component reflects priming of the spatially corresponding response by an abrupt stimulus onset that does not depend on the nature of the primary task. This unconditional component exhibits a biphasic pattern, with initial facilitation later turning into inhibition, analogous to that found for spatial cuing in visual detection tasks. The 2nd component reflects automatic generalization of task-defined transformations of relevant stimulus information to spatial codes; this conditional component does not depend on relative response speed. Possible connectionist implementations of the conditional mechanism are discussed.