The influence of irrelevant information on speeded classification tasks

Abstract

Multidimensional stimuli, which could vary on one, two, or all three dimensions within a particular series, were presented to Ss who were required to classify each stimulus on the basis of its value on a specified dimension. The prior relevance of the irrelevant dimensions and the difficulty of the task were varied. Latency and error data indicated that Ss were unable to gate the irrelevant information effectively. It was further concluded that this lack of perfect gating cannot be simply attributed to competing responses learned during the experiment. © 1971 Psychonomic Society, Inc.