Judgments of Direction About Words and Arrows: The Neglected Influence of Task Set

Two experiments investigated the role of task set in processing the direction indicated by arrows and words. In Experiment 1, in one block of trials, participants made stimulus-response (S-R) compatible manual responses to a left-or-right-pointing arrow in the presence of either a congruent or incongruent word (LEFT/RIGHT); in another block, they responded to the direction signaled by a word in the presence of a congruent or incongruent arrow. Task set was, therefore, simple in each block-respond to only one of the two stimulus types. Yet an incongruent word did not interfere with responding to an arrow's direction, whereas an incongruent arrow robustly interfered with responding to the direction signaled by a word. In Experiment 2, targets were instead defined in terms of a fixed location (for one group, the distractor appeared below the target; for another group, the distractor appeared above the target) such that the target on any trial could be either a word or an arrow. Task set now was more complex in that target type varied unpredictably across trials. Distractor words now interfered with arrows, and distractor arrows interfered with words more than they did in Experiment 1. These results require a more integrative account that embeds S-R compatibility within a larger framework involving contextually driven modulation of task set.