The Influence Of Task Difficulties And Stimulus Presentation Time On The Space-based And The Object-based Simon Effect

When the task irrelevant stimulus location is compatible with the correct reactionlocation, the reaction turned to be more quickly and accurate compared with they areincompatible, this phenomenon was named Simon effect. As one of the classical exampleof the stimulus-response compatibility effect, the cognitive mechanism of Simon effect isalways a hot research topic in the laboratory. According to the different frame of referenceof task irrelevant stimulus spatial characters which cause the effect, Simon effect can bedivided into the space-based Simon effect and the object-based Simon effect. On the basisof past researches, this paper used three types of task difficulty (include color identificationtask、graphic identification task and number parity identification task) and three kinds ofstimulus presentation time length (include300ms、600ms and1500ms) to discuss thedifferences between two Simon effect.We find that:(1) Both the object-based and the space-based Simon effect canindependently exist in the color identification task;(2)The object-based Simon effect ismore susceptible to the influence of task difficulty than the space-based Simon effect;(3)Increased stimulus presentation time, the object-based Simon effect kept a growing trendbut there were a trend of attenuation of the space-based Simon effect;(4)the object-basedSimon effect was increased with the growing reaction time while space-based Simon effectwas decay. This result imply that both the two Simon effects may rely on differentcognitive processing structure.