Strategies Of Flanker Coprocessing In Single Task And Dual Task Operations

The present study uses the Eriksen Flanker paradigm, divides the current task into two types of experiments, Single-task and Dual-task, and systematically manipulates the influence of different clue coding on the relationship of coprocessing degree between Flanker and task. In this way, we study the contribution of attentional strategies to selection and processing of currently irrelevant stimuli.Experiment 1 is a duplicate of the standard experiment of the Eriksen Flanker paradigm with the design of a certain stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA). Single and dual tasks are blocked. The results showed that the performance in dual task, compared with that in single task, that participants have a strong tendency to coprocess flankers to a large degree in a dual task scenario. The Flanker Congruncy Effect(FCE) in dual task is larger than that in single task, which indicates that flanker processing has already started before the response selection for the target has finished.To study what induces the conclusion of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 is designed whith single and dual tasks mixed within a block of trials.The color of flanker in Experiment 2A indicates the trial type (single task or dual task).The results shows that significant FCE is not because of high memory load but the result of adopting different attentional strategies.In Experiment2B, trial type(single task or dual task) is signaled by whether the color of target and flankers matched. With this procedure, the degree of flanker processing could no longer be based on the fixed, early color-filtering strategy like Experiment 2A, in which that color can be used for stimulus selection instead of location. The results of the present experiment demonstrate that the FCE differences between the trial types in the previous experiment did not depend on early color-filtering mechanisms.To avoid the phenomenon that the flankers always have to be attended for cue encoding in Experiment 2A and Experiment 2B, Experiment 2C was designed, in which the target color signaled the trial type. As the results show, the new cuing procedure led to a similar performance as the cuing procedures used previously.By designing the above experiments, the type of tasks is mixed or blocked, the goal is to investigate the degree that participants coprocess flankers in single and dual tasks. The results of the Experiments 2A,2B, and 2C demonstrate that irrespective of the specific cuing procedure, the participants generally coprocessed flankers more in dual tasks than in single tasks.