Brief ArticleHorizontal and vertical Simon effect: different underlying mechanisms?
Section snippets
Participants
Ten volunteer healthy participants (seven males; mean age: 34±10) took part to the experiment. All were right-handed, had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity, and were naive as to the purpose of the experiment.
Apparatus and stimuli
A Compaq 80386 Proline interfaced to a 14 in. monitor controlled stimuli presentation and behavioural data collection. The head was positioned in an adjustable head-and-chin rest. Distance between the eyes and the screen was 80–85 cm. Target stimuli were 4×4 red-and-black or
RTs
Mean correct RTs and percentage of correct responses are shown in Table 1. Behavioural data were submitted to repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs). The first ANOVA compared RTs in the two tasks. This analysis had two within-subjects variables: target-response correspondence (corresponding vs. non-corresponding trials) and task (horizontal vs. vertical). The two main effects were significant [F(1, 9)=41.3, P<0.001 for correspondence, and F(1, 9)=8.2, P<0.05 for task]. The main effect
Discussion
The differences between horizontal and vertical tasks suggest the existence of different underlying mechanisms. Although the regular analysis on mean RTs did not show any difference in the magnitude of the Simon effect, the distributional analysis revealed a substantially different time-course of the two effects. In the horizontal task the Simon effect decreased as RT increased in accord with the findings of previous studies (e.g. Rubichi et al., 1997), whereas in the vertical task the Simon
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Raffaele Orsato for helpful suggestions. This research was supported in part by grants from MIUR and from the University of Padua to Carlo Umiltà.
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2020, Brain and LanguageCitation Excerpt :First, the horizontal dimension is harder to discriminate, potentially due to our body symmetry along this dimension (Maki, 1979; Maki, Maki & Marsh, 1977; Sholl & Egeth, 1981). Second, previous studies have shown that some effects – for example the Simon effect – differentiate largely with regard to whether it occurs in the horizontal or vertical dimension (Vallesi et al., 2005). In the following paragraphs we will introduce these processing differences in more detail, first the general difference between the horizontal dimension and other spatial dimensions and second the role of dimension within the Simon task.