Samenvatting
A number of studies have shown that performance of identification and discrimination tasks is detrimentally affected by irrelevant information. It is suggested that these contradictory findings depend on whether the subject must make difficult discriminations among the relevant stimuli, the irrelevant stimuli, or between the relevant or irrelevant stimuli. The role of irrelevant information in these tasks is to enhance or amplify the competing responses engendered by the difficult discriminations.