ABSTRACT
The initial studies of Fitts and Seeger (1953) and Fitts and Deininger (1954), described in Chapter 1, sparked considerable interest in S-R compatibility effects. Numerous variations of compatibility effects have been the subject of a substantial amount of research since that time. There are many reasons for the continued interest in S-R compatibility effects, including that they (a) are pervasive phenomena evident in performance of both simple laboratory tasks and complex human-machine interactions, (b) are perhaps the purest measures of the basic cognitive processes that intervene between perception and action, and (c) yield considerable theoretical insight into the nature of those processes. The research since the early 1950s has built on the foundation provided by Fitts and colleagues to develop many new compatibility phenomena of interest as well as models of the processes that underlie S-R compatibility effects.
