5.5.1. In Action
A typical Simon task goes something like this: you fix your gaze at the center of a computer screen and at intervals a light flashes up, randomly on the left or the rightwhich side is unimportant. If it is a red light, your task is to hit a button on your left. If it is a green light, you are to hit a button on your right. How long it takes you is affected by which side the light appears on, even though you are supposed to be basing which button you press entirely on the color of the light. The light on the left causes quicker reactions to the red button and slower reactions to the green button (good if the light is red, bad if the light is green). Lights appearing on the right naturally have the opposite effect. Even though you’re supposed to disregard the location entirely, it still interferes with your response. The reaction times being measured are usually a half-second or less for this sort of experiment, and the location confusion results in an extension of roughly 5%.
It’s difficult to tell what these reaction times mean without trying the experiment, but it is possible to feel, subjectively, the Simon Effect without equipment to measure reaction time.
You need stimuli that can appear on the left or the right with equal measure. I popped outside for 10 minutes and sat at the edge of the road, looking across it, so traffic could come from either my left or my right. (Figure 5-2 shows the view from where I was sitting.) My task was to identify red and blue cars, attempting to ignore their direction of approach.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
