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Simon

This task is part of suite of four tasks created for Kinarm researchers in Psychology.  The tasks were developed by Dr. Kayne Park of the Boisgontier Lab at the University of Ottawa under a  co-funded MITACS project.

This task quantifies the influence of congruence between the spatial position of a stimulus and the required response. Participants are asked to respond to a stimulus presented on the left or right by reaching with the left or right arm (if bilateral; right if unilateral Kinarm), but the spatial position may or may not be congruent with the position of the expected response. Reaction times are recorded to assess the effect of congruence.

Kinarm users may find the robotic platform offers a robust platform for discriminating small differences in response time.  Further for those with Gaze-Trackers, a richer behaviour response can be quantified.

Detailed Description

The Simon task was developed to assess cognitive interference by having participants move in a spatial direction associated with a stimulus feature while ignoring the stimulus location. Participants are instructed to move left with one stimulus feature (colour, shape) and move right with another stimulus feature (different colour, shape). On each trial, participants are tested on how quickly they can move to the left or right depending on the stimulus that appears. The stimulus can appear in a congruent location (leftward stimulus in the left side of space), neutral location (leftward stimulus in the centre of the screen), or incongruent location (leftward stimulus in the right side of space). The reaction time difference between congruent and incongruent trials is known as the Simon Effect.

The Simon task has been commonly conducted as a bimanual task, but the Kinarm variant is unimanual.

The Kinarm variant is based on the version found here:

Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task. Psychology and Aging, 19(2), 290–303. https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.19.2.290.

A unimanual variant is found here:

Wiegand, K., & Wascher, E. (2007). Response coding in the Simon task. Psychological Research, 71(4), 401–410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0027-1

A foot pedal version found here:
Miller, J. O., & Franz, E. A. (2005). Dissociation of Bimanual Responses With the Simon Effect: On the Nonunitization of Bimanual Responses. Journal of Motor Behavior, 37(2), 146–156. https://doi.org/10.3200/JMBR.37.2.146-156

Note: The stimulus-response conflict (stimulus feature is related to response) is the main measure in cognitive interference tasks like Flanker, Stroop, and Simon tasks. However, stimulus-stimulus conflict can have a large influence on the cognitive interference effects (main feature of the stimulus is influenced by other stimulus features). The Simon task has been noted as a better task to assess cognitive interference compared to Flanker and Stroop tasks as it focuses on the stimulus-response conflict with minimal influence from the stimulus-stimulus conflict. The stimulus-response conflict is found in Simon (stimulus is in incongruent space), Flanker (distractor arrows in opposing direction to centre arrow), and Stroop tasks (Stroop Target text differs from Stroop Target colour). The stimulus-stimulus conflict is found in Flanker (centre and distractor arrows both need to be considered for movement) and Stroop (Stroop Target text and text colour need to be considered for movement) tasks. The Simon Effect of the Simon task can be influenced by a stimulus-location conflict (colour and location need to be considered for movement) but this conflict has been suggested to have a smaller influence on cognitive interference than the stimulus-stimulus conflict.

Mittelstädt, V., Ulrich, R., König, J., Hofbauer, K., & Mackenzie, I. G. (2023). The influence of reward in the Simon task: Differences and similarities to the Stroop and Eriksen flanker tasks. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 85(3), 949–959. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-022-02563-7

What's Included

In the zip file you will find:

• all source code to run the task
  • it is ready to run as-is, but is fully editable
• a specification ("BT097") outlining all the details of the task
• ready-to-go analysis that you can use to generate parameters right away