Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 76, Issue 3, June 1991, Pages 241-292
Acta Psychologica

Effects of preliminary information in a Go versus No-go task

https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(91)90022-RGet rights and content

Abstract

A series of studies using a Go versus No-go task examined the question of whether preliminary information available early in the recognition of a stimulus is made available to later processes before stimulus recognition is finished, a question relevant to the controversy between discrete and continuous models. Experiment 1 showed that a Go response is faster following a cue indicating that the response probably would be required than following a cue indicating it probably would not be required. Experiments 2–7 were conducted to find out whether analogous preparation occurred when probability of the Go response was signalled by easily discriminable features of a single stimulus rather than a separate cue. The effect was observed when the easily discriminable features uniquely determined the name of the stimulus letter, but not when they merely indicated that the stimulus name was one of two visually similar letters. These results are consistent with the Asynchronous Discrete Coding model, in which the perceptual system makes available to later processes only preliminary information corresponding to discretely activated stimulus attributes.

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    Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Chicago, November, 1988. A version of this article was prepared while the first author was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, and the use of their resources is gratefully acknowledged.

    This research was supported by grant PHS-MH40733 from the National Institute of Mental Health. We would like to thank Gordon Anderson, Richard Hector, and Albano Lopes for assistance in testing the subjects, and Robert Gottsdanker, Patricia Haden, Allen Osman, Harold Pashler, Maurits van der Molen, and Howard Zelaznik for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

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