Endogenous Spatial Orienting Modulates The Joint Simon Effect

Human being rarely perform their actions alone,rather often be affected by actions belonged to companies surrounding them.As one of the most typical stimulus-response task exploring whether participants’ cognitive representation is changed by the presentation of another individual when performing their own experiment,the Joint Simon task got the favors of most researchers.In traditional Simon task,individual participants need to respond to the appearance of targets which appear either left or right side on the screen according to non-spatial attributes(such as color or tones)of that targets with proper reaction bearing the characteristics of space(according to the left or right).While the space position of the targets has completely nothing to do with the experiment,the participants react faster when there is a consistence between the location of the stimulus and the spatial position of their reactions,compared to the inconsistent situations.This phenomenon is called The Simon effect.When participants were asked to react to only one of the targets,the traditional Simon task becomes a Go-Nogo task.In most cases,the Simon effect did not appear in this kind of Go-Nogo experiment task.But if this kind of Go-nogo task were assigned to two subjects separately by asking each one of them to respond to only one target,the Simon effect will appear again.This effect is called the "Joint Simon effect".Previous studies have shown that the influence factors of the Joint Simon effect can be separate as social factors and non-social factors.Social factors contained the relationship between the experimenter and the participants,the relationship between co-actors,and the biological properties of co-actors.Rather non-social factors contains the arrangements of targets,seating position,space occupied by participants and reaction key settings,and whether participants were asked to perform task with their crossed hands or not.Given previous researches about the Simon task borrowed their paradigm from the study of cognitive psychology,and given studies shown that the Simon effect usually affected by spatial attention,this study then focus on whether spatial attention orientation will also affect the Joint Simon effect.Through exploring the influence of spatial attention on the joint Simon effect,we intent to show that attention process plays a vital role in the joint Simon effect to improve the existing Joint Simon effect theories.This paper explore whether spatial attention reorientation influence the Joint Simon effect through three studies,and further verify this regulation is not from the social scenes of experimental setup,nor from the process of continuous spatial reference coding.Study One mix a manipulation of spatial attention using a directional arrow clue with traditional Joint Simon task to explore whether spatial attention influence the Joint Simon effect;Study Two further validate the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect does not come from the social scenes;Study Three further the research to investigate whether the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect comes from continuous spatial referential coding.Specifically,in Study One 35 college students perform the traditional Simon experiment task which added a manipulation of spatial attention clues to explore the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect,namely whether the size or the direction of the Joint Simon effect will be changed by different spatial attention clues.The data were analyzed in two-factor analysis of variance: 2(direction: ipsilateral,contralateral)×2(consistency: consistent,inconsistent).The dependent variable are the reaction time and accuracy.In Study Two,35 college students perform the same task to verify whether the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect depends on the social scenes.Data were analyzed through two-factor analysis of variance: 2(direction: ipsilateral,contralateral)× 2(consistency: consistent,inconsistent).The dependent variable are the reaction time and accuracy.In Study Three,33 undergraduates perform the same task to further investigate whether the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect depends on the continuous spatial referential coding processes.Data were analyzed in two-factor analysis of variance: 2(direction: ipsilateral,contralateral)× 2(consistency: consistent,inconsistent).The dependent variable are the reaction time and accuracy.Conclusions were obtained by the above three studies:(1)The Joint Simon effect went separation under different condition of spatial attention orientation,which indicates the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect.(2)When the participants perform experiment task alone,there still appeared different Joint Simon effect under different conditions of spatial attention orientation,which indicates the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect is not originated from social scenes.(3)Under the condition of the removal of effective referential coding,there still appeared different Joint Simon effect under different conditions of spatial referential coding,suggesting that the influence of spatial attention on the Joint Simon effect is not originated from continuous spatial referential coding.Attention plays a key role in the Joint Simon effect.