Salience,Induced Muscle Tension,and the Ability to Ignore Irrelevant Information

Two experiments are described that examined the effects of salience and induced muscle tension on subjects' ability to ignore irrelevant information in card sorting tasks. The results of the first experiment suggested that even though the responses appropriate to the relevant and irrelevant information were unrelated there was an effect of irrelevant information, but only when it was more salient than the relevant information. Induced muscle tension was found to improve performance based on less salient attributes but to degrade performance based on more salient attributes. The second experiment confirmed this latter finding using a version of the Stroop test. It is tentatively suggested that induced muscle tension may inhibit naming responses.