The official soundtrack to “Five shades of grey”: Generalization in multimodal distractor-based retrieval

When responding to two events in a sequence, the repetition or change of stimuli and the accompanying response can benefit or interfere with response execution: Full repetition leads to benefits in performance while partial repetition leads to costs. Additionally, even distractor stimuli can be integrated with a response, and can, upon repetition, lead to benefits or interference. Recently it has been suggested that not only identical, but also perceptually similar distractors retrieve a previous response (Singh et al., Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78 (8), 2307-2312, 2016 ): Participants discriminated four visual shapes appearing in five different shades of grey, the latter being irrelevant for task execution. Exact distractor repetitions yielded the strongest distractor-based retrieval effect, which decreased with increasing dissimilarity between shades of grey. In the current study, we expand these findings by conceptually replicating Singh et al. ( 2016 ) using multimodal stimuli. In Experiment 1 (N=31), participants discriminated four visual targets accompanied by five auditory distractors. In Experiment 2 (N=32), participants discriminated four auditory targets accompanied by five visual distractors. We replicated the generalization of distractor-based retrieval – that is, the distractor-based retrieval effect decreased with increasing distractor-dissimilarity. These results not only show that generalization in distractor-based retrieval occurs in multimodal feature processing, but also that these processes can occur for distractors perceived in a different modality to that of the target.