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Previous research has shown that responses to words are faster and more accurate in the go/no-go version of the lexical decision task (LDT) than in the choice-response version. This finding has been attributed to reduced response-selection demands in the go/no-go task. Here, we test an alternative account assuming similar response-selection demands in the two tasks, but an additional impact of polarity correspondence between stimuli and responses in the go/no-go task. Positive and negative polarities have been described as a frequent characteristic of binary stimulus and response dimensions. Only for the go/no-go version of the LDT, an apparent polarity difference between go and no-go responses exists, with go responses having the same polarity as words and no-go responses the same polarity as nonwords. Thus, compared with the choice-response LDT, in the go/no-go LDT, go responses to words should be facilitated by polarity correspondence, and go responses to nonwords should be inhibited by polarity noncorrespondence. In this study, each participant performed a go/no-go LDT and a choice-response LDT. Responses to words were faster and more accurate than responses to nonwords, and—consistent with the alternative account—this difference was larger in the go/no-go LDT than in the choice-response LDT. An analysis of performance by means of sequential-sampling models that take into account a decaying influence of irrelevant stimulus features supported the effect of polarity correspondence in the go/no-go LDT. This analysis suggested an effect in the choice-response LDT as well, though of a smaller size and a faster decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have to deal with conflicting information. This is studied in conflict tasks such as the Simon task or the flanker task. For example, participants respond with the left or right hand to the color of a stimulus (task-relevant stimulus feature) which is presented in a left or right position (irrelevant feature) in the Simon task or to a letter (relevant) which is flanked by same or different letters (irrelevant) in the flanker task. In incongruent trials, in which relevant and irrelevant stimulus features require different responses, reaction time is longer and errors are more frequent. This congruency effect is reduced after incongruent trials, dubbed congruency sequence effect (CSE). Here, we show that with temporally separated presentations of relevant and irrelevant stimulus features in the Simon task the CSE is strong with leading irrelevant feature, but declines with leading relevant feature. For the flanker task, this modulation of the CSE was unreliable. By means of an extended leaky, competing accumulator model, we contrasted two mechanisms of the CSE for the Simon task: gating of the irrelevant stimulus information and re-mapping of the stimulus positions to response positions after incongruent trials. The gating model failed to account for some aspects of the observed data which could be simulated by the re-mapping model. For the flanker task, there was not only a CSE, but also overall longer reaction times after incongruent trials. This required an extension of the re-mapping model in terms of higher response thresholds after incongruent than after congruent trials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).