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Grainger et al. examined flanker effects in an experiment where target words could be morphologically complex (e.g. farmer), have a pseudo-morphological structure (e.g. corner), or have no morphological structure (e.g. cashew). Target words were flanked on both sides by the left-aligned embedded word in the related flanker condition (e.g. farm farmer farm; corn corner corn; cash cashew cash). Effects of related flankers were compared with matched unrelated flankers (e.g. book farmer book). Significantly greater effects of flanker relatedness were found with morphologically related flankers compared with both pseudo-morphological flankers and non-morphological embedded word flankers. However, more recent work in Spanish has failed to replicate this specific pattern. We therefore sought to replicate our findings in French, while increasing experimental power and modifying the nonword targets. The results of the present study successfully replicate the findings of Grainger et al. [(2021). Morphological processing in the flankers task. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(3), 288–295. ]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research with adult participants reported a rightward bias in the reading version of the flankers task. Here, we investigated how this bias evolves as a function of reading expertise. We tested two groups of French primary school children from Cycle 2 (grades 1 and 2) and Cycle 3 (grades 4 and 5) and one group of adult participants. In the related flanker conditions, the central target word was flanked by the same word either on the left (park park ####), the right (#### park park), or on both sides (park park park). In the unrelated conditions, the repeated flanker words were replaced by a different unrelated word. In the analysis of standardized reaction times (RTs), there was a three-way interaction between the three groups of participants and the impact of flanker relatedness as a function of the position of the related flankers. This three-way interaction reflected the significantly greater increase in effects of flanker relatedness between Cycle 2 and Cycle 3 for the bilateral flanker and the right flanker conditions compared with the left flanker condition. This suggests that the rightward bias is driven by attentional asymmetries that develop during the process of learning to read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five flanked lexical decision experiments investigated the integration of information across spatially distinct letter strings. Experiment 1 found no significant difference between quadrigram flankers (e.g., CKRO ROCK CKRO) and double bigram flankers (e.g., CK RO ROCK CK RO). Experiment 2 varied the eccentricity of single bigram flankers and found that closer flankers generated greater effects. A combined analysis of these experiments revealed that the double bigram condition (Experiment 1) was less effective than the close single bigram condition (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 tested one explanation for this pattern – that the outer bigrams in the double bigram condition interfered with processing the inner bigrams, and that spatial integration only operates across adjacent stimuli. In Experiment 3, outer bigrams were now a repeat of the inner bigram (e.g., RO RO ROCK CK CK), and this repeated bigram condition was still found to be significantly less effective than single bigrams. Experiments 4 and 5 tested an alternative explanation whereby the addition of spatially distinct flanking stimuli increases the spread of spatial attention, hence reducing the impact of proximal flankers. In line with this explanation, we found no significant difference between repeated bigram flankers and a condition where only the inner bigram was related to the target (e.g., CA RO ROCK CK SH). We conclude that spatial integration processes only operate across the central target and proximal flankers, and that these effects are diluted by the increased spread of spatial attention caused by additional spatially distinct flankers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has shown that a sentence context can decrease the necessity for language control relative to single word processing. In particular, measures of language control such as language switch costs are reduced or even absent in a sentence context. Yet, this evidence is mainly based on bilingual language production and is far from straightforward. To further investigate this issue in the comprehension modality, we relied on the lexical flanker task, which is known to introduce sentence-like processing. More specifically, Dutch-English bilinguals (n = 68) performed a classification task in mixed language blocks on target words that were either presented alone or flanked by unrelated words in the same language. While overall no L1 switch costs were observed, we only observed L2 switch costs in the no-flanker condition. This pattern of results indicates that the presence of flankers can reduce or even abolish switch costs, suggesting that the language control process can benefit from sentence(-like) processing compared to single word processing.

The provided dataset represents the performance of adult individuals in three experimental tasks measuring cognitive inhibition: the Stroop task; the SART task and the Eriksen Flanker task. All tasks were initially completed in a web setting (online) by 485 individuals. Additionally, randomly selected participants completed all these tasks one more time (220 participants) or two more times (100 participants) during separate laboratory session(s) offline. The provided dataset contains data both from the offline and online experimental sessions. For the Stroop and Flanker tasks, we have provided data on mean reaction times for correct answers and the percent of correct answers for both congruent and incongruent trials. For the SART task, we have provided data on the number and the percent of commission and omission errors; the mean correct reaction times in “go” trials; the standard deviations of correct reaction times in “go” trials; the coefficients of variability for correct reaction times in “go” trials; the mean reaction times for successful “go” trials proceeding successful “no-go” trials; and the mean reaction times for correct “go” trials proceeding failed “no-go” trials. Data from both laboratory sessions contains information on the age and gender of participants. Additionally, we have provided the dates and hours of all experimental sessions. This dataset can potentially be reused for exploratory research on cognitive inhibition, i.e., the stability of individual cognitive inhibition capacity over time; intercorrelations of various inhibition task performance measures; individual differences in cognitive inhibition; or the influence of task setting (web vs laboratory) on inhibition performance measured in different settings (web vs laboratory).

Increasing the neighbourhood density of a word typically facilitates lexical decision responses and interferes in sentence reading. The Multiple Read-Out Model accounts for such variation by postulating that word responses in the lexical decision task can be made via two mechanisms – identifying the word or using the global lexical activity that it generates. Here, we asked whether adding unrelated flanking words to either side of the target would modulate the relative contribution of these two mechanisms. That is, do flankers promote the use of word identification processes that are more characteristic of sentence reading? In line with our hypothesis, in Experiment 1 flanker words increased the inhibitory influence of orthographic neighbours relative to single word presentation. In Experiment 2, flanker neighbourhood density did not affect lexical decisions to central targets. This pattern indicates that the mechanisms used to make a lexical decision can be modulated by a minimal "sentence-like" context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the processing of words with a transparent morphological structure benefit from this structure? Here we show that the flankers task provides an interesting novel angle on this well-researched issue. Participants saw transparent suffixed target words flanked by their stem (e.g. farm farmer farm), as well as pseudo-suffixed words and non-suffixed words flanked by their embedded word (e.g. corn corner corn; cash cashew cash). Targets were also tested with unrelated word flankers (e.g. book farmer book), and participants made lexical decisions to the central targets. We predicted that truly suffixed word identification would be facilitated by the presence of stem flankers over and above any purely orthographic effects that were expected to be revealed in the pseudo-morphological and non-morphological conditions. We found exactly that pattern and conclude that parallel processing of distinct word identities in the flankers task is modulated by the transparent morphological relations between these words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge for cognitive research is the better understanding of how motor activity influences and is influenced by other cognitive domains. We developed a preliminary study to investigate whether tracking motor functioning in virtual reality provides useful insight on cognitive functioning. We chose the flankers task as an assessment measure and built a VR environment into which seven participants completed more than 1250 trials. In addition to classical results of the flankers task showing that incongruent stimuli induce slower responses than others., we also identified how individuals are able to correct their initially incorrect motor response. This indicator may shed new light into the functioning of cognitive control in the future. We discuss the potential offered by virtual reality technology for cognitive assessment through embodied considerations of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does phonology contribute to effects of orthographically related flankers in the flankers task? In order to answer this question, we implemented the flanker equivalent of a pseudohomophone priming manipulation that has been widely used to demonstrate automatic phonological processing during visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, central target words were flanked on each side by either a pseudohomophone of the target (e.g., roze rose roze), an orthographic control pseudoword (rone rose rone), or an unrelated pseudoword (mirt rose mirt). Both the pseudohomophone and the orthographic control conditions produced faster and more accurate responses to central targets, but performance in these two conditions did not differ significantly. Experiment 2 tested the same stimuli in a masked priming paradigm and replicated the standard finding in French that pseudohomophone primes produce significantly faster responses to target words than orthographic control primes. Therefore, contrary to its impact on masked priming, phonology does not contribute to effects of flanker relatedness, which would appear to be driven primarily by orthographic overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has shown that a sentence context can decrease the necessity for language control relative to single word processing. In particular, measures of language control such as language switch costs are reduced or even absent in a sentence context. Yet, this evidence is mainly based on bilingual language production and is far from straightforward. To further investigate this issue in the comprehension modality, we relied on the lexical flanker task, which is known to introduce sentence-like processing. More specifically, Dutch-English bilinguals (n = 68) performed a classification task in mixed language blocks on target words that were either presented alone or flanked by unrelated words in the same language. While overall no L1 switch costs were observed, we only observed L2 switch costs in the no-flanker condition. This pattern of results indicates that the presence of flankers can reduce or even abolish switch costs, suggesting that the language control process can benefit from sentence(-like) processing compared to single word processing., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s).)

• We apply a new paradigm to study the role of morphology in reading development. • We show that the flankers task is sensitive to morphological relations, but only in adult participants. • Primary school children only showed effects of same-word (repetition) flankers. • The repetition flanker effects seen with children were restricted to short morphologically simple words. Recent research with adult participants using the flankers task has shown that the recognition of central target words is facilitated by the presence of morphologically related flanker words. Here we explored the development of such morphological flanker effects in two groups of primary school children (average ages = 8 years 6 months and 10 years 3 months) and a group of adult participants. We examined effects of a transparent morphological relation in two conditions: one where the target was the stem and flankers were derivations (e.g., farmer farm farmer) and the other where the flankers were stems and the target was the derived form (e.g., farm farmer farm). Morphological flanker effects were compared with repetition flanker effects with the same set of stimuli (e.g., farm farm farm ; farmer farmer farmer), and effects of related flankers were contrasted with the appropriate unrelated flankers. Results revealed no significant effect of morphological relatedness in the two groups of children and a significant effect in the adult group, but only for suffixed targets and stem flankers. Repetition effects for stem targets were found across all groups, whereas repetition effects for suffixed targets were found only in the older children and adults. These results show that morphological processing, in a context involving multiple words presented simultaneously, takes several years to develop and that morphological complexity (stem vs. derived) is a limiting factor for repetition effects in the flankers task with young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictable and unpredictable distractors may differentially affect attention. We adapted the Eriksen flanker task by manipulating the probability with which specific flankers occurred. Subjects reported the orientation of briefly-presented targets while attempting to ignore four flanking items. Flankers had either standard (90% of trials) or oddball (10%) orientations. Congruent and incongruent configurations were equiprobable, as were target orientations. Oddball flanker orientations substantially enhanced congruency effects: performance was best when the target was congruent with oddball flankers and worst when it was incongruent. We recorded scalp EEG while subjects performed the task, and later computed ERPs timelocked to stimulus onset. Oddball flanker orientations evoked a visual mismatch negativity (vMMN). Subjects’ temperament predicted individual differences in vMMN magnitude. Orientation sensitivity predicted larger vMMNs; attentional selectivity predicted smaller. Behavioral and vMMN results indicate that subjects exploit distractor predictability to support more-effective active inhibition; oddballs disrupt this strategy. Despite subjects’ attempts to ignore the flankers, unexpected distractors strongly influence neural responses and behavioral performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Patients with Parkinson''s disease (PD) are more sensitive than healthy controls to response-triggering by irrelevant flanking stimuli in speeded choice-response tasks. This increased responsiveness may either indicate a lack of executive control or reflect compensatory efforts to cope with the reduced internal motor drive. Of interest in this context is whether responsiveness is already enhanced in the presymptomatic stage of PD. To address these questions, we studied a group of non-manifesting carriers of heterozygous Parkin and PINK1 mutations while they performed a choice-response task with response-compatible or incompatible flankers. These mutation carriers may be considered a model for pre-clinical PD because the mutant allele leads to a latent nigrostriatal dysfunction and may increase the risk for PD. For comparison, we studied groups of medicated patients with idiopathic PD and of healthy persons age-matched to the mutation carriers and to the patients. Measurements of reaction time, error rate, and the lateralized readiness potential of the EEG provided converging evidence that the mutation carriers were less responsive to distracting flankers than their healthy control group. In contrast, PD patients were more distractible by flankers than their control group, which replicated previous results. Mutation carriers also showed a smaller N2 component of the event-related EEG potential in trials with incompatible flankers relative to their control group, which might indicate reduced inhibitory control. We hypothesize that faulty executive control is the primary deficit, reflected by the reduced N2 component in the mutation carriers. To compensate for this deficit, mutation carriers change their strategy of speed-accuracy trade-off, in order to dampen the excitability of their lateral motor system. Disease progression might prevent symptomatic PD patients from using this compensatory mechanism, leading to increased disinhibition of their lateral motor system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Can the presence of unrelated flanker words change the way that lexical decisions are made to target words in the flankers task? Here we examined the impact of flanker presence on the effects of word concreteness. Target words had high or low concreteness ratings (e.g., fork, free) and were either presented in isolation or flanked to the left and right by an unrelated word (e.g., cold free cold) that was irrelevant for the task. Results revealed that the facilitatory effect of concreteness (faster responses to concrete words compared with abstract words) was significantly greater in the presence of flankers. A control experiment revealed the same pattern with pseudoword and nonword flankers. We conclude that the mere presence of flanking letter strings causes a greater depth of processing of target words. We further speculate that this might arise by flankers inducing a more "sentence-like" context by the presence of multiple, spatially distinct letter strings, that prohibits the use of more superficial decision processes and can be used to make lexical decisions to isolated words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study was to examine visual attention, especially the executive control functions that deal with conflict, when participants were in a low arousal state shortly after a nighttime awakening. Fifteen participants spent four consecutive nights at a laboratory and performed a flankers task using two levels of target-distractor spacing (0.75° and 1.50°) and three trial types (compatible, incompatible, and neutral). The first night was a habituation night. For the next three nights, participants went to sleep at 2300 hours and were then awakened at either 2400 hours (1-h sleep bout), 0300 hours (4-h sleep bout), or 0600 hours (7-h sleep bout) and were administered a flankers task and a self-report questionnaire that measured arousal level. These testing times were counter-balanced across participants, and a 2100 hours (pre-sleep) flankers task was also randomly assigned to be completed on one of the testing nights. Response time on neutral-flanker trials was increased if participants were awakened from a sleep bout and was slowest at 0300 hours, appearing to parallel circadian body temperature. In contrast, failures of selective attention, as indexed by the difference between compatible and incompatible trials, increased linearly as a function of the length of the sleep bout. Compared to the 2100 hours pre-sleep condition, self-reported energy was lower and Tiredness was higher after awakening from a sleep bout. Taken together, the current data suggest a dissociation between the processes that perform a non-conflict task and the executive control of attention. Specifically, longer sleep bouts seem to be associated with greater difficulty in inhibiting task-irrelevant information, perhaps due to a sleep inertia effect affecting the anterior cingulate cortex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Conversion paralysis (CP) is featured by a stress-induced tonic immobility. Although the neural correlates of this psychiatric condition remain largely unexplored, previous reports showed CP to be associated with anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) hyperactivity. We examined the ACC action monitoring function by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) when conversion patients (n =6) with unilateral arm paresis made speeded responses with their affected and healthy arms on a flankers task. During this task, pre-response ACC action monitoring is reflected in the N2 ERP component, which is increased when incongruent stimuli lead to simultaneously activated competing response tendencies. The results showed that the N2 congruency effects were significantly increased for responses with affected hands compared to healthy hands. There were no such results for post-response monitoring. This study is the first to present electrophysiological correlates of action monitoring in CP and suggests ACC to be hyperactive when movements with affected arms are to be initiated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The provided dataset represents the performance of adult individuals in three experimental tasks measuring cognitive inhibition: the Stroop task; the SART task and the Eriksen Flanker task. All tasks were initially completed in a web setting (online) by 485 individuals. Additionally, randomly selected participants completed all these tasks one more time (220 participants) or two more times (100 participants) during separate laboratory session(s) offline. The provided dataset contains data both from the offline and online experimental sessions. For the Stroop and Flanker tasks, we have provided data on mean reaction times for correct answers and the percent of correct answers for both congruent and incongruent trials. For the SART task, we have provided data on the number and the percent of commission and omission errors; the mean correct reaction times in "go" trials; the standard deviations of correct reaction times in "go" trials; the coefficients of variability for correct reaction times in "go" trials; the mean reaction times for successful "go" trials proceeding successful "no-go" trials; and the mean reaction times for correct "go" trials proceeding failed "no-go" trials. Data from both laboratory sessions contains information on the age and gender of participants. Additionally, we have provided the dates and hours of all experimental sessions. This dataset can potentially be reused for exploratory research on cognitive inhibition, i.e., the stability of individual cognitive inhibition capacity over time; intercorrelations of various inhibition task performance measures; individual differences in cognitive inhibition; or the influence of task setting (web vs laboratory) on inhibition performance measured in different settings (web vs laboratory)., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Authors.)

The extent to which higher-order representations can be extracted from more than one word in parallel remains an unresolved issue with theoretical import. Here, we used ERPs to investigate the timing with which semantic information is extracted from parafoveal words. Participants saw animal and non-animal targets paired with response congruent or incongruent flankers in a semantic categorization task. Animal targets elicited smaller amplitude negativities when they were paired with semantically related and response congruent animal flankers (e.g., wolf coyote wolf) compared to unrelated and response incongruent flankers (e.g., sock coyote sock) in the N400 window and a post-N400 window. We interpret the N400 effect in terms of facilitated processing from the joint activation of shared semantic features (e.g., animal, furry) across target and flanker words and the later effect in terms of post-lexical decision-making. Thus, semantic information can be extracted from flankers in parallel and impacts various stages of processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]