Instruction-induced feature binding

The original idea for this paradigm was shaped during informal talks with Nachshon Meiran during the ESCOP conference in Edinburgh, 2001. We would like to thank Nachshon for his suggestions and his advice regarding this research project.

There was no hint of an effect in the inter-response times of those size-task responses that required two consecutive keypresses, implying that research participants planned (and finished) selection of their double-press responses before pressing the space bar for the first time.

Note that the resulting task representations are unlikely to be of verbal nature. First, it is hard to see how verbal coding would affect size task performance when the instructed S–R mappings are not even needed in the size task. Second, as mentioned in the Discussion part of Exp. 1, we carried out a replication experiment of Exp. 1 in which participants were required to hold a tongue depressor in their mouths that supposedly blocked their articulatory apparatus, thereby impairing (sub-)vocal rehearsal. Thus, even if there was a way for verbal codes to interfere with size task performance, their impact should have been reduced with tongue depressor. However, the tongue depressor results largely mirrored the Exp. 1 results. Hence, one may speculate that quasi-perceptual or conceptual codes were integrated during some sort of cognitive simulation during instruction understanding, that is, when situation models of the instructed situations were constructed (e.g., Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg & Robertson, 2000).

We are currently running an additional experiment that directly tests whether encounter-based binding makes any difference with respect to the tasks used in the present study. This experiment differs from the present Exp. 1 in that, similar to Stoet and Hommel (1999), the imperative target letter for the identity task is presented before the size-task, hence allowing response selection (but not execution) in advance of performing the embedded task.