Manipulating the salience of stimulus & response features in the spatial precuing task

Abstract

Reeve, Proctor, Weeks and Dornier (1992) demonstrated that the Gestalt grouping principles could be used to influence performance in the four-choice spatial-precuing task by enhancing the organizational features of the stimulus and response sets. Reeve et al. (1992), concluded that the most effective manipulations may be limited to those involving the stimulus set. The two present experiments attempted to enhance the organizational features of the stimulus-response (S-R) sets by increasing the response ensemble's salience through the use of textures placed according to the Gestalt principles as used by Reeve et al. (1992). Both experiments confirmed the previous findings of Reeve et al., reaffirming that the relative salience of stimulus set features is a powerful determinant of the coding operations that occur during the translation stage of information processing. Furthermore, the results indicated that, although perhaps not as powerful, manipulation of response set organization through the use of textures can produce results consistent with those obtained with the stimulus set manipulations.