Citation

Lien MC, McCann RS, Ruthruff E, Proctor RW. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 2005; 31(1): 122-144.

Affiliation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA. mei.lien@oregonstate.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/0096-1523.31.1.122

PMID

15709868

Abstract

The present study examined whether the central bottleneck, assumed to be primarily responsible for the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect, is intact, bypassed, or shifted in locus with ideomotor (IM)-compatible tasks. In 4 experiments, factorial combinations of IM- and non-IM-compatible tasks were used for Task 1 and Task 2. All experiments showed substantial PRP effects, with a strong dependency between Task 1 and Task 2 response times. These findings, along with model-based simulations, indicate that the processing bottleneck was not bypassed, even with two IM-compatible tasks. Nevertheless, systematic changes in the PRP and correspondence effects across experiments suggest that IM compatibility shifted the locus of the bottleneck. The findings favor an engage-bottleneck-later hypothesis, whereby parallelism between tasks occurs deeper into the processing stream for IM- than for non-IM-compatible tasks, without the bottleneck being actually eliminated.

Language: en