Abstract
There is a growing interest in assessing how cognitive processes fluidly adjust across trials within a task. Dynamic adjustments of control are typically measured using the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which refers to the reduction in interference following an incongruent trial, relative to a congruent trial. However, it is unclear if this effect stems from a general control mechanism or a distinct process tied to cross-trial reengagement of the task set. We examine the relationship of the CSE with another measure of control referred to as the item-specific proportion congruency effect (ISPC), the finding that frequently occurring congruent items exhibit greater interference than items that are often incongruent. If the two effects reflect the same control mechanism, one should find interactive effects of CSE and ISPC. We report results from three experiments utilizing a vocal Stroop task that manipulated these two effects while controlling for variables that are often confounded in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed large CSE and ISPC effects. Importantly, these effects were robustly additive with one another (Bayes Factor for the null approaching 9). This finding indicates that the CSE and ISPC arise from independent mechanisms and suggests the CSE in Stroop may reflect a more general response adjustment process that is not directly tied to trial-by-trial changes in attentional control.
Highlights
Attentional control is the ability to select relevant attributes from the environment for additional processing while ignoring competing and possibly more salient attributes
Some of the earliest alternative explanations suggested the congruency sequence effect (CSE) is produced by low-level feature characteristics such as item repetition (Mayr et al, 2003; Hommel et al, 2004) or response contingency (Schmidt and De Houwer, 2011). Such confounds certainly do contribute to the observed effects, careful experimentation that has controlled for these confounds has generally still produced the expected finding, albeit reduced (Duthoo et al, 2014a; Kim and Cho, 2014; Schmidt and Weissman, 2014). Together these findings suggest that abstract properties of the prior stimulus are at least partially responsible for cross-trial changes and the CSE can be used as a marker of attentional control adjustment
item-specific proportion congruency effect (ISPC) analysis The first and necessary step in our analysis is to demonstrate that an ISPC effect was obtained in our modified design
Summary
Attentional control is the ability to select relevant attributes from the environment for additional processing while ignoring competing and possibly more salient attributes. The Stroop color naming task (Stroop, 1935) is a classic test of attentional selection. In this paradigm, individuals are presented with color words printed in colored ink (e.g., the word RED in blue ink) and are instructed to name the ink color and ignore the word. Extant models have been informed by the robust finding that interference on Trial N is consistently smaller when the stimulus on Trial N-1 was incongruent relative to when that item was congruent (Gratton et al, 1992) This phenomenon is known as the congruency sequence effect (CSE)
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