5.5.2. How It Works
For my traffic watching exercise, the unimportant factor of the location of the colored cars was interfering with my tapping my left or right knee. Factoring out the location variable by speaking instead of knee tappingeffectively routing around the Simon Effectmade the whole task much easier.
Much like the Stroop Effect [Hack #55] (in which you involuntarily read a word rather than sticking to the task of identifying the color of the ink in which it is printed), the Simon Effect is a collision of different pieces of information. The difference between the two is that the conflict in the Stroop Effect is between two component parts of a stimulus (the color of the word and the word itself), while, in the Simon Effect, the conflict is between the compatibility of stimulus and response. You’re told to ignore the location of the stimulus, but just can’t help knowing location is important because you’re using it in making your response.
The key point here is that location information is almost always important, and so we’re hardwired to use it when available. In real life, and especially before the advent of automation, you generally reach to the location of something you perceive in order to interact with it. If you perceive a light switch on your left, you reach to the left to switch off the lights, not to the rightthat’s the way the world works. Think of the Simon Effect not as location information leaking into our responses, but the lack of a mechanism to specifically ignore location information. Such a mechanism has never really been needed.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
