Capacity requirements for automatic responding in audition and vision :

Abstract

Both the capacity demands of automatic responding and the generalizability of automatic/controlled processing theory across input modalities were assessed. In Experiment 1, auditory and visual analogues of a consistently-mapped memory search paradigm were constructed. One group of subjects developed automatic responding to auditory targets while another group acquired automatic responding to visual targets. The results illustrated the generalizability of automatic responding in vision to audition. In Experiment 2, the spatial position of possible targets presented during the test period was cued prior to each trial. Cueing, which activates attentionally-controlled processing, benefited automatic responding in both the auditory and visual tasks. Also in Experiment 2, reliance on previous knowledge of memory set items as compared with actual presentation of four items in the memory set had no effect on performance, supporting automatic/controlled processing theory. In Experiment 3, subjects performed single and dual memory search. The primary task was unpracticed and the secondary task was the one previously automated. The general pattern of results for subjects trained in either modality were similar and dual task manipulation did not interfere with performance in the primary task. However, concurrent memory search produced substantial performance deficits in the automated secondary task compared with single task measures. In the secondary task, the effects of dual task load were additive, suggesting that processing was automatic. The findings were interpreted as evidence that automatic responding requires expenditure of small amounts of attentional resources, supporting a distributional model of attention.