Analysis Of Avital Cohen And Tsal Essay - 1384 Words

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available