Automatic effects of no-go instructions

Autor: Jasper Degryse, Marijke Theeuwes, Baptist Liefooghe
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Zdroj: CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-REVUE CANADIENNE DE PSYCHOLOGIE EXPERIMENTALE
ISSN: 1878-7290
1196-1961
Popis: Instructions play an important role in daily life. Instructions specify response rules and the conditions in which these apply. In recent years, research has emphasized the importance of instructions, and an increasing number of studies have demonstrated that the power of instructions is far stronger than previously thought. Research has indicated that instructions can induce (e.g., Liefooghe, Wenke, & De Houwer, 2012; Meiran, Pereg, Kessler, Cole, & Braver, 2015a), modulate (e.g., Cohen, Bayer, Jaudas, & Gollwitzer, 2008), and even eliminate (e.g., Bardi, Bundt, Notebaert, & Brass, 2015; Theeuwes, Liefooghe, & De Houwer, 2014) automatic effects on behavior. At the present time, research has primarily focused on instructions specifying that a particular response has to be made or a response strategy has to be adopted (e.g., press fast) when a particular condition is met (e.g., the presentation of a stimulus). Nevertheless, a substantial amount of instructions in daily life do not include the requirement to respond but the requirement not to respond. To our knowledge the impact of these instructions has not been investigated so far. Accordingly, the present study investigated whether no-go instructions that have not been applied overtly before can also bias behavior automatically.No-go instructions are typically used in the go/no-go task (Donders, 1868/1969). In this task, instructions relate one stimulus to a go response and another stimulus to a no-go response. The proportion of false hits on no-go trials is considered an index of the ability to inhibit the tendency to respond. Recent studies have suggested that no-go responses are completed through automatized control processes (e.g., Verbruggen & Logan, 2008). Verbruggen and Logan (2008) used a go/no-go task in which participants executed a go or a no-go response to either a living or a nonliving object. After a practice phase, the go/no-go requirements switched. For instance, if living objects required no-go responses in the practice phase, living objects required go responses in the test phase. The test phase also included new stimuli that were not presented in the practice phase. Verbruggen and Logan observed that go responses to stimuli, which required a no-go response in the practice phase, were slower compared to go responses to new stimuli. In a follow-up experiment, such slowing was observed when the go and no-go responses in the test phase and the practice phase had to be applied to different stimulus features, for instance, size (e.g., small i go; large i no-go) in the practice phase and livingness (e.g., living i go; nonliving i no-go) in the test phase. On the basis of these findings, Verbruggen and Logan suggested that associations between a stimulus and a no-go response are established on the basis of practice and that such associations can be retrieved automatically later on.The present study investigated whether effects similar to the those reported by Verbruggen and Logan (2008) could be obtained for no-go instructions that were never practiced overtly before. To this end, we used a procedure introduced by Liefooghe et al. (2012; see also Liefooghe, De Houwer, & Wenke, 2013). In the original procedure of Liefooghe and colleagues, participants were presented with different runs of trials on which two tasks could be performed: the inducer task and the diagnostic task. In each run, both tasks shared the same stimuli and responses. Furthermore, each run used a different pair of stimuli, and stimuli were never reused across different runs. At the beginning of each run, participants received two novel arbitrary stimulus-response (S-R) mappings of the inducer task. Each S-R mapping assigned the identity of a stimulus to a left or a right response (e.g., If "X," press left; if "Y," press right). Before executing the inducer task, several trials of the diagnostic task had to be performed. In the diagnostic task, participants decided whether a stimulus was presented in italic or upright, again by pressing a left or a right response key (e. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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