<p dir="ltr">The implementation of vibrotactile stimuli has grown in necessity where visual and auditory modalities are overloaded. However, how attention is oriented using vibrotactile information has been minimally investigated compared to other modalities, such as visual and auditory stimuli. The ability to elicit an appropriate mapping between a response from a specific vibrotactile stimulus can be explained in three different frames of reference accounts: internal, external, or remapping. Previous research has answered questions relating to the ability to use different reference frames but have yet to agree which frame orients attention for creating an automatic response. Using various stimulus-response mapping effects, the current study investigated how competing frames of reference are used to orient attention to select a response based on specific characteristics of vibrotactile stimuli. Experiment 1 validated the novel apparatus developed for this study by obtaining a stimulus-response compatibility effect. Experiment 2 investigated if an external or internal reference frame is used to orient attention automatically. The uncrossed-hands condition provided a replication of Experiment 1 and confirmed that a stimulus-response compatibility effect was present. For the crossed-hands condition, a diminished, reverse stimulus-response compatibility effect was present. Experiment 3 found no meaningful difference between a magnitude aligned (i.e., left associated with low frequency) versus misaligned (i.e., left associated with high frequency) conditions for frequency of vibrotactile stimuli, suggesting vibrotactile stimuli do not hold a mental magnitude line. Overall, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that processing of vibrotactile information is not reliant on only an internal reference frame but instead the external frame has some influence on selecting a motor response. Experiment 3 also suggests that task context influenced the stimulus and response mapping provided in the instructions, rather than the intrinsic, anatomical representation of vibrotactile stimuli.</p>

Das dominante Datenmuster im Bereich des kognitiven Alterns ist der Alters-x-Komplexitätseffekt. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, ob das Muster statt durch einen üblicherweise postulierten unspezifischen durch einen spezifischen Mechanismus erklärt werden kann: die mit dem Alter abnehmende Reliabilität episodischer Akkumulatoren. In sechs Reaktionszeit-Experimenten wurden junge und ältere Erwachsene verglichen, dabei wurden frühe kognitive (Stroop-Bedingung) und episodische Schwierigkeit (Reiz-Reaktions-Zuordnung) orthogonal manipuliert. Die vorhergesagte Dreifachinteraktion der beiden Faktoren mit dem Alter zeigte sich über die Experimente hinweg relativ konsistent. Eine modifizierte Brinley-Analyse ergibt deutlich unterschiedliche Steigungen der Regressionsgeraden im Alt-Jung-Raum für niedrige und hohe episodische Schwierigkeit. Als methodischer Beitrag wird im Anhang ein zur modifizierten Brinley-Analyse passendes Regressionsmodell entwickelt, das aus einigen einfachen Verarbeitungsannahmen folgt. Es wird gezeigt, dass in einer klassischen Brinley Metaanalyse die Steigung neben der theoretisch interessierenden Varianz von theoretisch uninteressanter Zwischen-Experiment-Varianz beeinflusst wird. / The age-by-complexity effect is the dominant empirical pattern in cognitive aging. The current report investigates whether a specific high-level mechanism---an age-related decrease in the reliability of episodic accumulators---can account for the age-by-complexity-effect, which is commonly assumed to be caused by an unspecific, low-level deficit. Groups of younger and older adults are compared in six reaction time experiments, using orthogonal manipulations of early cognitive difficulty (e.g., Stroop condition) and episodic demands (e.g., stimulus-response mapping). The predicted three-way interaction of age and the two factors was observed fairly consistently across experiments. A modified Brinley analysis shows that different regression slopes in old-young-space are required for conditions with low and high episodic difficulty. As a methodological contribution, a Brinley regression model following from certain simple processing assumptions is developed. It is shown that in contrast to a standard Brinley meta-analysis, the regression slopes in this model are not influenced by theoretically un-interesting between-experiment variance.