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.