Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

What is crossed in crossed-hand effects?

1986; Elsevier BV; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/0001-6918(86)90006-5

1873-6297

Lucia Riggio, Luiz de Gonzaga Gawryszewski, Carlo Umiltà,

Face Recognition and Perception

In choice RT tasks, when the subject crosses the hands two effects are observed: the direction of spatial compatibility reverses and response latency becomes overall longer. It has been proposed that the location of the response is compared to both its anatomical status (i.e., the hand that emits the response) and the location of the stimulus. When the hands are crossed, the former comparison yields the lengthening of RT while the latter yields the reversal in the direction of spatial compatibility. The present study aimed at testing the relative importance of two locational aspects of the response (i.e., the position of the effector and the position of the response goal) which were confounded in all previous studies. In both experiments the hands were always in anatomical uncrossed position but the position of the response goal might or might not be the same as that of the effector. In experiment 1 the responses were emitted by the index fingers, which were either uncrossed or crossed, whereas in experiment 2 the responses were emitted through two sticks, which again were either uncrossed or crossed. The results replicated both the reversal of spatial compatibility and the lengthening of RT. It was concluded that the effects of crossing the hands are due to the crossing of the response goals.