Too much information … The influence of target selection difficulty on binding processes

ABSTRACT The binding of stimuli and responses is an important mechanism in action control. Features of stimuli and responses are integrated into event files. A re-encounter with one or more of the stored features leads to automatic retrieval of the previous event file including the previously integrated response. The distractor-response binding effect evidenced that even irrelevant stimuli can be integrated with a response, subsequently trigger retrieval and thereby have an impact on behaviour. However, the type of distractor stimuli, the method of distractor presentation, and the display configuration largely differed in previous studies with regard to the target selection difficulty. In the present study, we thus varied the extent of target selection difficulty to investigate its role on the distractor-response binding effect. The results indicated that both processes, distractor-response binding and distractor-response retrieval are dependent on target selection difficulty. These results are discussed against recent theorizing in the BRAC framework (Frings, C., Hommel, B., Koch, I., Rothermund, K., Dignath, D., Giesen, C., Kiesel, A., Kunde, W., Mayr, S., Moeller, B., Möller, M., Pfister, R., & Philipp, A. (2020). Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(5), 375–387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.02.004).