Cohen and Tsal are hypothesizing in their article …show more content…
They modified it so they could manipulate the categories of distractors while still controlling bottom-up factors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The independent variable in their experiment is the type of distractors, meaning whether they are incongruent or congruent. Another independent variable is the letter or word condition. The dependent variable is the reaction time. They chose S or O for target letters and set two conditions. In condition one, distractors are always letters. In condition two, distractors are always digits (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). They also created a critical distractor which they used to measure the interference effect for each condition. The critical distractors are ambiguous characters, meaning they can be read as digits or letters. For this experiment they used S-5 and