The Influence Of Task-irrelevant Information On Saccadic Eye Movements

In daily life, we often react to the features of an object which we are interested in. However, the irrelevant features of the object also influence our perception and reaction at the same time. Both the Simon and Stroop tasks are related to this phenomenon in which the irrelevant information take effects on our perception and reaction. Researchers have paid special attention to the influence of conflicting information to the manual reaction and conducted lots of research on both of the tasks, arguing on the similarities and differences between these two effects. As one of the reaction models, eye movement has very close relationship to the visual cognition. In the past, most research on Simon Effect and Stroop Effect applied manual reaction dealing with the reaction separately. Therefore, we combined these two tasks in our research to investigate the summation of these two effects. When the irrelevant movement direction information and semantic information exist at the same time, what kind of influences will occur toward saccadic behavior and how the process of conflict will be solved? From this prospect, we try to clarify the differences and similarities between Simon Effect and Stroop Effect.In experiment1, the biological movement was used by which can indicate the movement direction as the dynamic stimulating material of Simon task to explore the influence of irrelevant stimulating movement direction information to eye movement. In experiment2, we used bot perceptual and semantic conflicts stimuli in the Simon task to test the influence of both irrelevant direction and semantic information to the eye movements. The experiment results show that Saccadic Simon effect exists. And when two kinds of irrelevant conflicting information exist at the same time, intervention to the saccade plan stage will go up to the maximum extend. Moreover, this intervention happens in the reaction selection stage of the saccade plan. Our research suggested that there could be different processing pathways for different information processing in these two tasks.