Culture Difference Of Up—left/Down—right Advantage Effect

In daily life, we would encounter all sorts of conflict situations, affecting the goals reached. In the field of the behavior and control, when participants are asked to execute spatial location responses to the position of the stimulus, stimulus response compatibility(SRC) effect can be observed, which refers to the fact that responses are faster when the stimulus location corresponds to the location of the assigned response(consistent condition) than when it does not(inconsistent condition). At this time, the difference of reation time(RT), which comes from the RT of consistent condition minus that of inconsistent condition, is the size of the SRC effect. when the stimulus location is irrelevant, a typical SRC effect can be observed, which was called Simon effect. In the Simon tasks, the stimulus location is irrelevant, and participants are asked to execute spatial location responses(left or right keypresses, verbal report of left or right) to the nonspatial feature (usually color or shape) of the stimulus. The phenomenon is relatively general, both domestic and foreign research have obtained consistent results.The research of classic SRC effect and Simon effect mainly focus on one situation when stimulus and response dimensions are physically Parallel to each other. However, in recent years, foreign research discovered that the SRC effect emerges when the stimulus and response dimensions are physically orthogonal to each other,which was called orthogonal SRC effects. In the orthogonal SRC task, the participant were asked to execute spatial location responses to the location of stimulus which presented on the top or bottom of fixation point. When participants were instructed to make lateralized responses to a vertically arrayed stimulus set, performance is usually better when the right response is assigned to the up stimulus and the left response to the down stimulus than when the mapping is opposite, namely. up-right/down-left advantage. The orthogonal SRC effects emerge even when the stimulus position is task irrelevant. However, the phenomenon of the orthogonal SRC effects and Simon effect had overlooked by demestic researchers. Because there are the culture difference between easterner and westerner, we were wondering whether Chinese participants would have up-right/down-left advantage. Similarly, when the stimulus location is task irrelevant, whether Chinese participants would obtained the orthogonal Simon effects? Because all accounts of these phenomena attribute them to response-related processes in foreign studies, we wonder what mechanism be involved in the phenomenon which be obtained by Chinese partcipants. To explore above questions, we have perform three experiments.In Experiment1, we utilized the orthogonal SRC task, the participants were instructed to make left-right responses to stimuli presented above or below a fixation point shown in the center of the display screen. Each participant performed the task with both the up-right/down-left and up-left/down-right mappings, with the order of the mappings counterbalanced among participants. According to foreign studies manner, the up-right/down-left mapping was defined as the consistent condition, the up-left/down-right mapping was defined as as inconsistent condition. The results showed that the responses of inconsistent condition are faster than that of consistent condition, which implied the Chinese particpants obtained up-left/down-right advantages. In addition, the results of the reponse time distribution analysis showed that the size of the up-left/down-right advantages increased with increasing RT, which suggested the up-left/down-right advantages may orignate from the interaction of cognitve codes.In Experiment2, we utilized the orthogonal Simon task, the participants were instructed to make left-right responses on the basis of stimulus color while ignoring its location. The results were similar to that of Experiment1, which again confirmed that Chinese had up-left/down-right advantages even when the stimuli location was task irrelevant. The results of the reponse time distribution analysis showed that the size of the up-left/down-right advantages kept stable with increasing RT, indirectly indicating the nature of the reversal orthogonal Simon effect was cognitive effects.In Experiment3, we combined the perceptual load task with the orthogonal Simon task to explore whether the effects our obtained involved the processing of perceptual stage by comparing the condition of high load and low load conditions. In the experiment, the target stimuli was randomly presented on an eight postion which formed a circle, the rest postion were presented by nontarget stimuli. In the low load condition, the nontarget stimuli were identical; but in the high load condition, they were all different. we only analysis the stimuli of vertical direction. In Experiment3A, the stimuli were colored circle, the participants were asked to make left/right responses to the red/green circle. The outcome implied the level of perceptual did not affect the size of up-left/down-right advantages. In Experiment3B, in order to increase the processing depth of perceptual load task, the stimuli were replaced by letters. The outcome showed that the size of up-left/down-right advantages in high load condition was larger than that in low load condition. According to the perceptual load theory, the results of Experiment3indicated that the emergence of up-left/down-right advantages did not involve the perceptual-related process, which indirectly implied these effects might originate from response-related processes.In conclusion, we can confirm that Chinese participants obtained up-left/down-right advantages in orthogonal SRC task and Simon task, which were opposite to up-right/down-left advantages in foreign studies. The results of response distribution analysis in Experiment1and Experiment2implies the up-left/down-right advantages can be attributed to the interaction between stimulus-location codes and response-location codes which respresented by relative location. The outcome that perceputal load does not affect the size of up-left/down-right advantages suggest these effect does not involved the process of perceptual stage. We can confer up-left/down-right advantages might originate from response-related processes.