Inhibitory effects of irrelevant information on reaction time in classifying target items
Yuji Hoshino · Japanese Psychological Research · 1991
Two experiments were conducted to reveal inhibitory effects of irrelevant information on reaction time in classifying target items. Subjects were not required to respond to the irrelevant information, either appearing simultaneously with the traget in the visual field, or embedded in the target. In Experiment 1, eight subjects were asked to classify the item as a word or a nonword. High-and low-frequency words written in reversed letter-order constituted the nonword items. Familiarity of irrelevant information embedded in the nonwords induced no interference effects on the nonword classification. In Experiment 2, 24 subjects classified four words into two response categories repeatedly under four distractor conditions. There were categorical-and noncategorical-classification tasks. The distractors presented simultaneously with the target showed inhibitory effects on the categorical classification, and the effects of the distractor conditions interacted with the effect of repetition in the noncategorical-classification task. When the properties of irrelevant information are difficult for subjects to ignore and are imperative to process, they would produce inhibitory effects on the classifying performance.