Huestegge, L. & Koch, I.
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
The simultaneous execution of two responses is known to cause interference. This was also demonstrated for saccades and manual responses, but potential interference between saccades and vocal responses remained an open issue yet. In Experiment 1 of the present study, participants responded to lateralized auditory stimuli by saying “left”/“right” (vocal task), by executing a left/right saccade (saccade task), or both. Unlike saccades combined with manual responses, here responses do not involve shared physical characteristics (e.g., left/right movements), but only shared conceptual attributes (i.e., both involve the cognitive concepts of left/right). Results indicated that both vocal responses and saccades exhibited dual-response costs, indicating that shared physical characteristics of both responses are not necessary to produce dual-response costs. In Experiment 2, we additionally introduced a condition without shared conceptual attributes across responses (i.e., vocal responses “yellow” vs. “green”). This condition led to increased dual-response costs, indicating that participants in Experiment 1 benefit from shared abstract response characteristics via response-code priming.