How well is our brain able to focus and not let distractors get in the way? Through results of flanker tasks, it seems that our brain is not that good with ignoring distractors. This leads to a debate on whether top down processes are used in both targets and interfering distractors in flanker tasks or if bottom up processes are used. In a research article, titled “Top-Down Processes Override Bottom-up Interference in the Flanker Task” by Rotem Avital-Cohen and Yehoshua Tsal, it is clear that one of these theories is more supported by the evidence given. This article goes in to detail about a study done to provide more evidence for top down processing applying to the targets as well as the flanking distractors. An important question that this article tries to answer is what the fundamental differences are between target and distractor processing and the quality of attentional filtering. This article is able to support their claim by using many topics discussed in class lectures.
Cohen and Tsal are hypothesizing in their article …show more content…
They modified it so they could manipulate the categories of distractors while still controlling bottom-up factors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The independent variable in their experiment is the type of distractors, meaning whether they are incongruent or congruent. Another independent variable is the letter or word condition. The dependent variable is the reaction time. They chose S or O for target letters and set two conditions. In condition one, distractors are always letters. In condition two, distractors are always digits (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). They also created a critical distractor which they used to measure the interference effect for each condition. The critical distractors are ambiguous characters, meaning they can be read as digits or letters. For this experiment they used S-5 and
Cohen and Tsal are hypothesizing in their article …show more content…
They modified it so they could manipulate the categories of distractors while still controlling bottom-up factors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The independent variable in their experiment is the type of distractors, meaning whether they are incongruent or congruent. Another independent variable is the letter or word condition. The dependent variable is the reaction time. They chose S or O for target letters and set two conditions. In condition one, distractors are always letters. In condition two, distractors are always digits (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). They also created a critical distractor which they used to measure the interference effect for each condition. The critical distractors are ambiguous characters, meaning they can be read as digits or letters. For this experiment they used S-5 and